


Swallow the Screams

by Katsitting (Nekositting)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Ancient Egyptian Literature & Mythology, Biting, Bodily Fluids, Breathplay, Explicit Sexual Content, Extremely Dubious Consent, F/F, Female Harry Potter, Female Voldemort, Fingering, Horror, I Took Liberties With the Mythos, I'm messing heavily with consent, Multiple Orgasms, Overstimulation, Painplay, Slightly Disturbing Imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2017-08-13
Packaged: 2018-12-11 14:28:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 10
Words: 47,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11716269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nekositting/pseuds/Katsitting
Summary: “Yes, Harrie. Your little friend had nearly murdered you. Perhaps, unintentionally, perhaps not. But that hardly matters now, does it? My rebirth is imminent, and you—” Voldemort crooned, stepping so close to Harrie’s shaking body that there was hardly a centimeter of space between them; Voldemort’s breasts level with her own pallid face. “—will facilitate this, my little lion.”Harrie felt her vision swim when the locket tightened further, cutting off what little air could pass through her obstructed windpipe.“Eternity you have sought, and eternity you shall receive. Your life spared but another taken,” Voldemort whispered before digging the wooden stick against her quivering throat, teasing along  the chain biting against her neck.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [parapringles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/parapringles/gifts).



> Hello, everyone!
> 
> Here to bring you another weird dark au. I let this one run with me as well. It was originally 10k words, but nope. It is triple that. And this is not crack. Finally. 
> 
> This is a gift and prompt-fill for my favorite Puff. I truly appreciate what you have done for me over the past summer. I am grateful for your encouraging words.
> 
> Thank you for being my beta for the past few stories. This one is a treat.
> 
> Keep the tagged warnings in mind. 
> 
> P.S. Thank you, Phoenixrisingdusk for betaing c:

Harrie sighed for what was the hundredth time that morning.

Her feet kicked at a tiny pebble on the ground, waiting for Hermione to come out from out of her apartment building. She listened to the sound of cars speeding past and hoped that the cloudy sky above did not decide to explode with water.

Harrie’s patience was thinning with each passing second, time ticking on by without a single word from Hermione.

She huffed and turned her attention away from the glass entrance, glancing at her wristwatch and swearing at just how late it already was.

It was almost noon. Just what the bloody hell was keeping Hermione?

She was tempted to walk up to her apartment door and knock, to drag the girl out from the book her nose was definitely stuck in, but instead of doing just that, Harrie waited.

She had already sent her millions of texts and several heated voice messages, there was really not much else she could do—short of storming into the building.

But sod it, this was the opening day to the exhibition!

She had been hounding the girl about the event for weeks, Hermione surely should have known what this meant to her.

But gauging from just how late the girl was—at least three hours to be exact—Hermione had forgotten completely.

_Marvelous._

And then, almost as if summoned by Harrie's impatient thoughts, Hermione burst out from the lobby entrance. Harrie noted the flushed hue on Hermione's cheeks and the frazzled state of her hair, as if she had been sprinting through numerous flights of stairs. And that was precisely the case, if Harrie was being honest. Hermione lived at the topmost apartments, away from the noise of the bustling city on the ground floor and the raucous sounds of other students throwing parties. It was quite expensive, but Harrie knew that Hermione would sacrifice anything to study in peace.

Hermione certainly enjoyed her solitude, but Harrie just knew the girl had to regret in that second living on the highest floor.

"What was keeping you so long?" Harrie could not curb the impatience in her tone when Hermione finally made it to where Harrie was waiting impatiently. Harrie was standing just at the end of the sidewalk and it was almost pleasing to note the embarrassment that flushed Hermione's cheeks at Harrie's reprimand.

_Good._

It wasn't often that Hermione was late, and it should have registered to Harrie in that precise second that there had to be a reason for it. But the exhibit was beckoning to her, its allure seizing Harrie's mind.

She grabbed Hermione's hand into her own then, practically dragging the girl down the sidewalk, to where the taxis typically did their business. Harry did not wait for Hermione to respond, yanking on the girl’s arm in her haste to get to the museum.

Harrie was hailing a cab before Hermione could even catch her breath, Harrie's arm sticking out until one pulled up beside her moments after. Harrie opened the door, waving her hand impatiently as Hermione quickly slid into the seat. Harrie followed shortly after, slamming the door harder than necessary in her eagerness, before turning her attention to the sullen driver.

The man glanced up at her from his rearview mirror, but did not otherwise say anything.

"British Museum, please." Harrie rushed, her short body bouncing eagerly in her seat as the driver grunted in affirmation before pulling away from where the car had stationed. Hermione had yet to say a word, but Harrie did not think much on that.

The moment Harrie had been waiting for was looming so near.

"Harrie." Hermione said after gathering her composure, her voice coming out in a gasp. Harrie turned her brilliant green eyes to the girl, noticing just then how unkempt Hermione looked. It dampened Harrie's anticipation entirely—worry instead overshadowing her excitement as she reached out to press a soothing hand on Hermione's shoulder.

"Are you alright? I should have known sooner. I-I'm sorry, Hermione. You look _horrid_." Harrie felt incredibly guilty at the exhausted look on Hermione's face, taking in the dark circles beneath her eyes and sallow shade to her normally warm skin.

Hermione _did_ look horrid. How did she miss this?

It should have been the first thing Harrie noticed. It was just so bloody obvious.

"I'm sorry I took so long. I had a pretty rough night." Hermione started, her tone rather strained as she grabbed Harrie's hand into her own to give it a soft squeeze. Hermione's hand was shaking and it made Harrie's guilt and worry churn uncomfortably in her gut—her face deflating further.

"What happened?" Harrie asked, hoping that her voice sounded soothing, and not as guilty as she felt.

Hermione was silent for a moment.

A pin could have dropped in that instance and Harrie was sure that both of them would have been able to hear it. It was startling really—the way just one quick assessment of a friend could throw the day's excitement up in the air.

"Remember that paper I told you about?" Hermione hedged, pausing for a second to stare into Harrie's eyes. It was inquisitive, her brow raised as if seeking permission from Harrie to continue.

Harrie merely nodded her head, jerking every now and then when the driver hit a curve or turned around in the streets. Entirely captivated by Hermione’s hesitation.

"It was due last night and well, my computer died on me." Hermione continued and Harrie felt distressed at just where this conversation was heading.

Surely, Hermione did not lose it all in just one fell swoop? It couldn't be true. Harrie sincerely hoped that was _not_ the case.

She couldn’t help but think the worst though because in all the time Harrie had known Hermione, she had never looked _quite_ this flustered.

Hermione looked like she was about to faint.

"Before you continue, please tell me you didn't lose that paper." Harrie stated, squeezing Hermione's as she spoke, hoping that the gesture would be both a comfort to her and Hermione. Harrie doubted she could handle that sort of stress. Sure, she was not the most studious, foregoing the university route and choosing the police life instead.  

But even she could understand what it was like to lose a paper. Having lost a few herself with a looming deadline hanging over her head like a death sentence.

"...yeah." Hermione whispered, ducking her head down as if ashamed that she had allowed something like that to happen to her. "I had to rewrite everything before the deadline last night. I didn't get any sleep until I managed to send it in."

That certainly explained why her typically punctual friend had not been ready by the time they had chosen.

Harrie cussed under her breath, frustrated with herself. She should have _known_. Harrie was more observant than most—she knew Hermione like the back of her hand! This was unacceptable.

"I'm so sorry, Hermione. I know how hard you worked on that paper. You've been raving about how awful that professor is for months now." It was true.

That professor was, from what Harrie had gathered from his online reviews and Hermione’s first-hand accounts, a total prick.

It was still a shock to the senses that Hermione had not dropped the class. But Harrie could certainly admire Hermione's tenacity. Though Harrie often wondered if the girl was some sort of masochist, all things considered. The man, from what Harrie could glean from Hermione’s stories, clearly disliked her.

One snide comment was innocuous, but a rude remark practically every class?

That was more than him being an arsehole.

He clearly had something against Hermione.

"It's okay, Harrie. I didn't tell you. But worry not, the paper has been submitted. I may feel like total shite, but nothing a lovely day in the museum and a cup of coffee can't fix." Hermione teased then, a small smile dancing across her lips.

The gesture made Hermione’s features light up pleasantly.

Harrie smiled at her in response, before turning her attention back to the world zooming past them in the car. Her breath caught when she saw the looming structure of the museum growing larger with each passing breath. The leather of the seat beneath her squeaking loudly when she began to vibrate in her seat with excitement; the mass of people rushing past the moving car mere blips in her mind.

The museum was an imposing edifice—its pillars and stone walls beckoning for her with its promise of its splendors. It hardly mattered that she’d been to the British museum hundreds of times over since moving to London.

It still punched her in the gut with its beauty, and she doubted that it would ever lose its effect on her.

She turned her gaze back to Hermione's face after drinking her fill of the building, and grinned mischievously, unable to resist the excited twist Hermione's lips sported. Hermione’s own mirth beckoned for her own, and Harrie just knew that this would be another wonderful memory. It was unfortunate that Ron could not join them, still living comfortably with his parents in Godric’s Hollow as he mulled over what field of study he wished to pursue. But, Harrie knew that there would be more opportunities than this one.

Harrie would make sure of it. As exciting as it was to explore this world with Hermione, they both knew that Ron would appreciate and enjoy the experience just as much.

"We'll definitely make the most of this." Harrie said, releasing Hermione's shoulder to stare out the window, past the people and the cars, and towards the clear sky. The stormy clouds gone, and in its place, bright blue.

It seemed that there would be no rain, and that made something warm curl in her gut. The emotion was like eating chocolate after a long day of work—a treat that hearkened back to lazy afternoons with her mum and dad, sitting by the fire and sharing stories of their youth.  

It was definitely going to be an amazing afternoon.

Harrie could just feel it.

* * *

 

When Harrie and Hermione jumped out of the cab, the world was in chaos. There were throngs of people at the entrance—the shouts and jeers of men, women, and children drowning out the thrumming of her blood rushing to her ears. She could hardly think through the noise, but she pressed forward with Hermione in tow. Mindful of the fact that this was to be expected considering the opening of a newer exhibit in the Egyptian section.

Though, Harrie mused as she passed through a couple of snickering children and their parents, it was probably less the exhibit and more the fact that there was a pretty good deal on the entrance fee.

Harrie slipped between people easily, her smaller stature a blessing as she trekked towards the entrance, Hermione’s hand now clasped in her own. The line was long, but Harrie skipped past them without a second glance, shuffling quickly through the crowd until she was met by the massive lion statues sitting prominently by the entrance.

She expected to hear protests for cutting some of the families off, even a begrudging comment from Hermione for her action, but there was nothing. Hermione was blissfully silent, and the crowd behind her, seemingly too engrossed in their own conversation to take note of them.

_Good._

That suited her just fine. She had a VIP pass that allowed her quick entrance, for both herself and two other guests. She didn’t have time to argue with an over-tired father and a catty mother as to why she was simply slipping right past them and allowed entrance before them.

She slipped in easily inside, Hermione hot on her heels. Her hand slipping into her jeans to pull out her pass and pulling it out, prepared before the guards could even think to ask her if she could just skip the line of people waiting outside the door.

She smiled at the man’s short nod, his massive body easily dwarfing her own, and watched as he stepped aside to allow Hermione and Harrie to pass.

Harrie tugged Hermione by the hand, and flit past the open doorway into the main lobby.

The first thing Harrie noticed was the smell, her hand releasing Hermione’s own to stare into the room and inhale the rich scents wafting through her nostrils.

Baked biscuits and coffee.

It smelled divine—like the treats her mum would often bake for on the weekends.

She flickered her gaze back Hermione, noting the way the girl froze several feet within the room. Hermione was staring hard at the Court Café just a few feet away, longing and desperation so thick on her face that it came as no surprise when Hermione stepped in that direction.

Harrie wanted to laugh, but she repressed the urge. It wasn’t really fair to laugh when her friend had spent the whole evening writing her life away.

A cup of coffee would definitely do the girl some good.

“Go get some coffee, ‘Mione. The exhibit can wait a little longer.” Harrie leaned in to whisper in her ear, unable to repress her smile when the girl jolted. Surprise and gratitude swimming in her gaze when she glanced at Harrie, before breaking into a jog. Her legs took her to the café nearest to the Ancient Egypt exhibit, and Harrie wondered then just what she did to have found such an amazing friend.

Harrie smiled, delighted, and followed after the bushy-haired girl.

Harrie trailed closely behind her, her gaze straying away from Hermione’s moving form to survey colorful world around her. The space was alive with people of different shapes and sizes, some young and some old, as she walked past them.

Their voices were cacophonies in the massive room—emphasizing rather than detracting from the richness of the lobby as Harrie noted the different shops at the opposite end of the room, where an old man was selling merchandise to a family of four.

It never ceased to amaze her.

She’d been to this museum tons of times, but it was different every time. For some, she mused, it probably all looked the same. Though she doubted that others shared her thoughts on the matter. But Harrie would agree to disagree—there was just something eternal about watching the faces of children lighting up in awe at the different sights. Their cherubic faces flushed and smiling as their parents ushered them through the various entrances at either side of the massive area.

Harrie was watching memories form here—the kind that could never be so easily erased. Even if the art work stayed the same—if the faces of the people changed, there was always something new to find.

The cylindrical form at the center of the room was the focal point of the place, and Harrie drawn in to the exquisite architecture—watching children run up the stairs to reach the shops up top, and their parents chasing after them.

Harrie watched it all with a small smile, nearly bumping into a couple that had wandered between herself and Hermione. An apology fell easily from her lips, an embarrassed flush to her cheeks tinging her cheeks pink.

_Whoops._

Harrie hastily turned back to look for Hermione, stopping short of the café entrance when she saw Hermione standing behind a short line of people.

Harrie once again turned her gaze away from her; toward the exhibit calling for her just several feet ahead. She knew that Ancient Egypt exhibit had changed little since the last time she had been there—but it was still by far her favorite one. She could appreciate the Enlightenment room and even the Medieval Europe exhibit, but there was just something about Egypt that drew her attention.

On a normal day, Harrie would explore all of the rooms. Delighted to see something new in each room. But today, she had not come to sightsee.

She had come with a purpose.

To see Voldemort’s exhibit—the newest mummy in the museum’s possession.

From the moment she had read the article announcing its arrival, Harrie was compelled to learn about her. An urge far too similar to hunger pangs; a sharp pressure between her navel and her ribcage that demanded that she _go_ and sate the burning curiosity in her mind. She didn’t know what it was, or why she felt it, but she couldn’t withstand it.

She _needed_ to go.

And so, here she was. Waiting for Hermione to come out to head toward the exhibit and see for herself if what the archeologists were claiming was true.

Harrie did not know how long she had been staring at the mass of people going about their business. It wasn’t until Hermione was tugging at her shoulder, coffee in hand, that Harrie realized truly how long she’d been standing there staring out into the crowd.

She must have looked creepy, she thought before sighing.

It couldn’t be helped, really.

“Ready to go?” Harrie asked, eyeing the coffee cup in Hermione’s hand. Smiling, Hermione took a sip of her coffee, a warm flush coloring her cheeks before answering.

“The coffee hasn’t kicked in yet, but I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.” Hermione replied, her lips pursing into a rueful smile.

It was signal enough to encourage Harrie to start moving. Hermione’s hand closed around Harrie’s shoulder then, noting that the crowd in the short second they had spoken had somehow gotten larger. They twisted away from their moving bodies, sweeping through the slivers of space between couples and children walking up ahead of them towards the room housing the massive Egyptian sculptures.

After walking closely behind a couple that refused to let them through, they finally broke through the mass of people and into the large chamber. Harrie’s relief was almost instantaneous—the crowd seemingly less oppressive now that they were no longer trying to squeeze through a too narrow entrance to the room.

The statue of Ramses the Second stood proudly at the center of the room, its splendor drawing Harrie’s eye almost immediately upon freeing herself from the crowd. She hardly noticed that Hermione had let her shoulder go, so caught up by the array of statues present.

She was enraptured by the resplendence, fixing her gaze on the dark stone and the stylized features of old kings and gods laid bare to her gaze. It was only when Hermione suddenly seized her at the wrist, tugging and gesturing for her to move to the opposite end of the room, that Harrie was snapped from her trance.

The West stairway was only a short walk—that side of the room significantly more empty than the rest of the area. Harrie was almost reluctant to part from the view of the room, but she did not come here for Ramses the Second.

The statue had remained unchanged for thousands of years, and had been in this part of the museum for years since Harrie’s arrival to London. She doubted that he was going anywhere.

She had come here with a purpose. She could not afford to waste any more time than she already had gawking at the room.

It still sucked to leave—but Voldemort beckoned to her. It was an insistent whisper, and Harrie, gave in to Hermione’s tugs, looking mournfully around the wide room. She could see the Rosetta Stone at the end, and various statues of long dead pharaohs that she could not recall in that second. Their displays peppered throughout the room to give onlookers just enough space to look, and move on.

There was a throng of people over up on the second floor, their discussions carrying to where Harrie and Hermione were heading.  She could spend eternity just watching them stare into the different displays—consumed as she often was by the glass displays housing ancient relics.

But when Hermione’s tugs became more painful, a sharp pain shooting up her arm, Harrie started to move more alertly. She turned her gaze away from the varying sculptures and displays to stare intently at Hermione’s back—focusing entirely on the way the girl’s hair swayed with each movement.

It was the safest view considering just where they were.

Harrie knew that if her gaze even strayed one inch away from Hermione’s back, that she’d be lost once more to the wiles of the Ancient Egyptian world. And waste most, if not all, of her time there rather than at the exhibit she had dragged Hermione to see in the first place.

Harrie tried not to wince when Hermione’s grip tightened, and she quickened her pace. Breaking past the grand entrance of Ancient Egypt statue exhibit and to the flight of stairs they needed to take, tucked away behind another grand statue.

“I swear, Harrie Lily Potter, you’ve seen this room millions of times already!” Hermione complained, finally releasing Harrie’s wrist from her painful grip. “Ramses the Second isn’t going to suddenly stand and walk out of the museum. _None_ of these statues are going anywhere.”

Harrie blushed at that, jabbing Hermione in the shoulder to prompt the girl to stop chiding her. Embarrassed, Harrie focused her attention to the doorway. Her ears tinged pink as she tried not to feel so bloody shy that she had, admittedly, already had that very same thought.

And then Harrie was moving, Hermione hot in pursuit.

They worked quickly up the stairs, Harrie, her embarrassment easily overcome by excitement, jumping two steps at a time with Hermione following behind her at a more reasonable pace.

They were on the ground floor and they needed to get to the fifth floor of the building.

It was certainly no picnic, but Harrie was not training to become an officer for nothing. Going up several flights of stairs was nothing compared to her own exercise regime.

Though, Harrie thought, glancing over her shoulder to watch Hermione trek up the stairs, the same could not be said for her best friend. Hermione was the antithesis of physical shape—choosing instead to exercise her mind rather than her body with a good book. Harrie knew the girl was stronger than she seemed—it certainly wasn’t easy carrying the mountain of books she lugged around the school to her flat—but running up the stairs was a whole other matter.

“I can slow down for you if you’re winded, ‘Mione.” Harrie called, pressing her glasses back up her nose when they had fallen too low on her face.

Hermione scoffed.

The sound of her feet shuffling more quickly alerting Harrie that Hermione was picking up speed to catch up to her much quicker pace.

Harrie tried not to groan, already suspecting the reason for Hermione’s impromptu increase in speed. It seemed that Harrie had somehow offended Hermione—it definitely wasn’t Harrie’s intention in the least.

Imagining the stubborn set to Hermione’s jaw, Harrie slowed down slightly in hopes that Hermione’s ire would be soothed somehow.

_Honestly._

It wasn’t a lie that Hermione wasn’t in shape. But Harrie did not speak a word, knowing that saying anything at all would only worsen the situation. Especially when Hermione was likely to be more prickly than usual from spending a whole night without sleep.

Harrie felt immediate relief when they finally arrived to the fifth floor. Eager to get to the exhibit as quickly as possible, in the hopes that Hermione would be sufficiently distracted to remain upset.

She heard Hermione gasp aloud, surely finally catching up to Harrie’s pace, before the sound was cut off by the sound of people moving past them. Their footsteps echoing and disrupting the silence that had fallen between Hermione and her. Harrie wasn’t sure when the mass had moved out from the lower floor and come up—but it hardly mattered then.

She walked to the bin by the door of the exhibit, and Hermione, seemingly done with her coffee, followed to toss out her empty cup. Hermione’s face was flushed and sporting a sheen of perspiration, a stubborn set to her jaw that reminded Harrie instantly of her comment earlier.

Harrie could tell that her unaffected appearance did little to abate Hermione’s frustration, stifling a sigh when Hermione took one glance at her pristine form and sniffed, before heading through the open doorway. Harrie followed closely behind her, noting that they now were in the Middle East room as the sign so indicated. There were people milling about, but the room was thankfully emptier than the ground floor had been.

Harrie could move freely behind Hermione without worry that she was going to bump into anyone, and made good on this opportunity by stepping beside the miffed girl, and pointing to the tapestry up ahead. The fabric looked old, its edges frayed and its color muted with age. But it was undeniable that it was beautiful—the curving patterns and symbols weaving into complex webs that reminded Harrie of Arabic.

Of the old books her mum would show her about the varying cultures around the world.

Harrie stared at the tapestry for a moment longer, and then turned to Hermione, instantly smiling when the girl had visibly relaxed and her jaw looked significantly less tense. Hermione no longer looked like she was ready to fight her, and that was more than Harrie could ask for.

“Isn’t it pretty? Sort of reminds me of those books you used to show me and Ron back in grade school.” Harrie teased, watching Hermione’s cheeks redden with her outrage. Harrie knew she was about to get the lecture of lifetime just then, the glint in Hermione’s eyes warning enough.

But it was certainly fun to tease her—if only to distract her.

_And now, I make my escape._

Turning away from the fuming girl, Harrie ran.

She turned right, rushing past a group of teenagers she thankfully did not ram into, to make her escape. She grinned when she heard Hermione’s angry shout through the noise of shuffling feet, unable to stifle her laughter at the exasperation in Hermione’s voice.

“ _Harrie Lily Potter! You get back here.”_

Noticing the large glass displays at either side of the entrance to the Egyptian room, Harrie ran past them to enter the next room, quickly slipping between the people just exiting from the corridor. She stopped abruptly when she nearly slammed into the sign reading “Tomb Chapel of Voldemort,” shooting a glance behind her to see just how far Hermione was.

Harrie scanned the group of people walking about, but could not find Hermione. Her stomach jolted nervously, but she squashed the feeling down. Hermione would find her eventually, whether it was within the next five minutes or the next half-hour—it was only a matter of time.

Harrie turned back to the room, noting with satisfaction that the room was mostly empty. There was perhaps one or two people milling about—and that suited Harrie just fine. This meant more time for her to explore the room and really get a sense of just who the mysterious Voldemort was.

The room was much smaller than the Middle Eastern room she had been in previously, but it in no way detracted from its appeal. If she was being honest, she felt that it even added to the allure; emphasizing the pricelessness of the different objects displayed behind glass in different sections of the exhibit.

The room resembled the inside of what she could imagine an Egyptian tomb looked like—the modernity of the outside exhibits with their glass displays and sleek metal containers, a contrast to the yellow, stone walls surrounding her. Harrie knew it was not _actually_ stone. But under Harrie’s critical stare, it definitely looked convincing.

 Whoever had arranged everything definitely knew what they were doing.

It looked almost real and Harrie was tempted to press her fingers to the wall just to see for herself. She was standing by the exit, struck dumb by the different images etched onto the walls on either side of her—a few glass displays housing actual murals from the cavern Voldemort had been found in and several relics recovered from the site.

She was pulled to the center of the room by the same force that had seized her earlier—her own curiosity compelling her to walk further inside and feast her eyes on the images of several women walking into the chapel to lay their offerings. Her gaze traced along the drawings—bizarre shapes drawn beneath the women’s feet on the wall.

It was like nothing she had ever seen before—unlike the elegant swoops and curls of the calligraphy in the previous room. The writing curved, but the shapes were tightly pulled inwards—weaving beneath the pictures as seamlessly as the tapestry Harrie had shown Hermione just several minutes before. Harrie wondered if it was a language—a tongue that, if Harrie recalled correctly, could be found.

It was fascinating for her, the way it almost twisted beneath the women’s ankles like a serpent. She wondered if it was telling its own story—if it was another explanation as to why the women were marching onwards to a towering chapel to lay down their offerings.

Harrie followed the pictures until she was prevented from moving further by a rope barrier. The seamlessness of the images obstructed by an opening in the wall, tucked away behind barrier.

It didn’t look like a door.

Harrie could see the cracks at its edges—almost as if someone had broken through the stone. It was not smooth like the walls at either end—the pictures of the women notably absent just inches from the cavern.

Harrie squinted through her glasses to make sense of what could be in there, but the area was shrouded in shadows. It was black—so dark in fact that Harrie was surprised the museum only had one meager barrier to shoo away curious onlookers.

She pursed her lips in thought, shooting her gaze past the various displays in the room to the entrance, looking for both Hermione’s familiar bushy mane and the presence of others.

It was empty.

_Dare I?_

Harrie was more than tempted to go in. Her gaze cutting away from the entrance to look above her for any cameras.

There were none pointed directly at the entrance. The deformed white boxes with blinking lights swiveling around to take in most of the room, but seemingly stopping short of capturing the opening to the darkened room.

It was strange—and Harrie knew that she shouldn’t go in. She wanted to be part of the London police—she didn’t need that on her record. But it was only a peek, she certainly didn’t plan to linger too long inside and increase her chances of getting inside.

If Hermione were there, well, she would not even be considering such a thing. But the girl was nowhere to be found, and Harrie, unable to resist the pull, slid beneath the barrier and slipped into the inky black.

The first thing she noticed was how cold it was.

Her arms immediately prickled with gooseflesh, her thin tank top and jeans ill-equipped to handle the full power of the refrigerator-like air. It resembled more a restaurant freezer than a museum, and Harrie shivered despite herself, wondering if she had somehow slipped inside where the museum kept its mummies.

It certainly felt that way to Harrie as she walked further into the corridor, unable to make anything out. She walked freely without bumping into anything, and Harrie wondered then if this was simply going to be another extension of the exhibit. A new room that had not yet been completed to further expose Voldemort to the viewing crowd.

She stopped when something bright caught her eye—a flash of gold and white, brilliant against the black that flickered at her. It was so quick that Harrie almost didn’t catch it, but she knew what she had seen.

She started moving again, her footsteps cushioned by the carpet beneath her feet.

It was unsettling—like she was deep underwater rather up on dry land. There was absolute silence, and she wondered idly if she had somehow landed herself in one of those strange vacuums scientists spent weeks raving about. Or even a wormhole. It was disorienting, the way the room just drowned everything out. Eroding and eating away at one’s sense of self the further one went in.

_Perhaps I should have thought this through more clearly._

She hugged herself when the room grew colder the further she went, her breaths coming in fast as she sought out the light that had interrupted the black sea like a ripple in tranquil waters. Feeling her unease explode into panic—the voice in the back of her head begging her to go back, growing louder and louder the deeper she went in.

_How bloody large is this room?_

Harrie felt like she had been walking for an eternity. The voice in the back of her mind whispering for her to go back—to simply abandon this little adventure and wait for Hermione to find her. And she almost did, her footsteps wavering when the same light flashed out once more.

Much closer this time.

It gave her the confidence she didn’t know she was lacking; her feet shuffling faster until just at the end of the corridor—or at least, that was what she thought was the end—she could make out a long string of trickling light. It looked incredibly small, but it was enough to compel her into a full run. The unease of walking through literal nothingness shoved aside in favor of seeking out what this light could be—of where it was that it could lead.

She cursed when she smacked face first into a hard surface—her arm shooting out to rub her nose and blink away her tears. Her glasses, thankfully, were unscathed despite the scare. But just barely.

_Bloody hell, nearly took my nose out._

Waiting for the pain to abate, Harrie stared at the bright light until the sting died down into a low throb. She reached out and planted her hand where the light was trickling through a small hole in the black, her fingers meeting an uneven surface she immediately identified as wood. The surface felt scratchy beneath her fingers—like the plywood her mum and dad bought at B & Q the time Harrie had stuck her foot through the door.

She would never forget the hour she was forced to sit through both her mum’s lecture, while having each splinter remove from her leg.

Harrie’s guess was that this room was probably to serve as an extension to the exhibit was a correct one then.

She pushed and the wood gave—parting easily for her and nearly blinding her with the light that suddenly swept over the room.

She blinked away the dark spots dancing across her vision, before making out then that she was at some other part of the Egyptian exhibit. But one she surely did not recall seeing on the map in her subscription.

Shuffling out from the darkness behind her, Harrie closed the makeshift door with a soft plunk and looked in awe at the different murals on the walls. Similar to the ones she had seen in the other Voldemort exhibit. There was an open doorway at the far end to her left—the only exit save for the one she had come through.

The walls were pressed closely together—this room much smaller than the one Harrie had been in earlier by at least four meters. She was sure that on a busier day, this would be a nightmare for anyone with some variant of claustrophobia. The roof was only one meter above her head.

It was fortunate for her that she was not afraid of small spaces. Or was relatively average in height because if she had taken after her mum, she’d have bashed her head in when she ran out of the darkened corridor.

It was only when she turned to survey the wall on her right that she realized just what this room was. These pictures were nothing like the ones she had seen in the earlier chamber—of beautiful women offering animals and leaving other valuable gifts at a massive temple. The women here were entirely nude—their bodies prostrate in veneration as they gazed fondly at the image of a giant serpent on one singular point on the wall. Harrie turned to survey the other side, and the women were the same—kneeling and staring at the wall directly in front of Harrie with awe.

Their hands notably absent of any jewels to lay before the serpent. And their faces—Harry frowned as she looked—painted white.

The scrawl that Harrie had noted in the previous room was bleeding between the cracks of the walls—just beneath where the feet of the women were. It was almost identical.

It sucked out all the air from Harrie’s lungs, and she couldn’t help stop herself from following the images until she was forced to stop when her legs were centimeters away from what looked to be a coffin. The strange language was carved onto it as well—its patterns weaving through depictions of serpents and of various animals being devoured by it. It was horrifying in its brutality—and Harrie was more than a little unsettled by how graphic it was.

There was even an image of a lion being swallowed whole—the snake’s jaw unhinging to fit the creature into its maw.

The art was not overtly detailed, but the impact of it was enough.

And she couldn’t look away from the tragedy depicted there. Of the story the images told.

Swallowing audibly, Harrie started to circle along the coffin—unable to stop staring as the serpent grew larger with each panel—until finally, instead of the pattern of coils along the snake’s flesh, there was only a lone figure present. Obscured entirely by black paint, Harrie could not make out what they looked like. The black reminiscent of the shadows that had draped thickly around her when she had stumbled through the unknown corridor she came through.

But if there was one thing she was sure of, it was that this was a person. The figure was standing on two legs—and last time Harrie checked, snakes didn’t have limbs.

Harrie had circled back to where she had started, but she didn’t feel any less confused by what she had seen. The naked women with pale faces on their knees in veneration, the snake that devoured creature after creature it came across, and the snake that could transform into a human.

It birthed more questions than it did answers.

Harrie could not recall ever hearing a story like this. She was familiar with some Egyptian myths—the story of Set and his disdain for Osiris, perhaps the most obvious one such cruel images inspired. She was also somewhat familiar with the Goddess Renenutet who protected both the harvest and the King. Her poison the perfect defense.

But these pictures, despite the devotion plain on the women’s faces, were unsettling. There was nothing protective about this massive, green serpent—its red eyes stealing the air right out of her lungs as it consumed the lion.

There was no King that she could see standing behind the serpent in need of protection. It made no bloody sense.

She wanted to ask Hermione more than ever if she’d ever come across something like this before in her studying; if there was something Harrie had missed in her own research. But that would have to wait until she found her bushy-haired friend—she was the only one there, and she was convinced she may remain as such for quite some time.

Straightening, Harrie noticed that the coffin’s lid had been removed. Her attention so fixed on the hieroglyphics and the strange script that she had failed to notice such a crucial fact before.

The casket was raised high above the ground—at least a half a meter higher than how mummies typically were. She had seen enough of them in the mummy room to know that they were typically set lower on the ground—the curators catering to families by making it easier for children to get on their toes and look inside.

Harrie leaned over, then. Sliding up to the balls of her feet to make out just what lied inside.

Harrie’s jaw dropped.

She couldn’t believe what she was seeing—one hand pinching just under her arm to ensure that she was not in fact dreaming, but awake.

Harry's breath caught at the sight of Lord Voldemort in the flesh. Her snake-like appearance both frightening and enthralling.

The woman’s body was completely exposed to Harrie's hungry stare, only the thin glass between them protecting the mummy from Harrie’s sudden impulse to reach out and _touch._ It was fortunate that there was glass there, because Harrie was sure that in that second she would have given in to the maddening itch in her fingers.

She ignored the urge in favor of looking at Voldemort, biting hard on her lip to remind herself that touching dead things was weird and creepy.

Voldemort was a thin woman, but from what Harrie could tell, the woman seemed stronger than she looked. Her muscles, despite the atrophied state of her body, very clearly defined—almost oddly so, considering how desiccated most mummies tended to be. Harrie could see the cuts of her muscles, the power in her arms and exposed calves belying just how shapely she had once been.  

Voldemort had definitely been active too—and surely, not a slave considering the myriad of luxuries Harrie had noted in the earlier exhibit. She was someone important—there was no mistaking it. Who the devil would etch such beautiful symbols and take the time to mummify a figure if they simply had not been? It was common practice for prominent figures to receive such an honor, and Voldemort fit that bill to a T.

_And the woman's face._

Now that was definitely the stuff of nightmares. Harrie could not deny that.

Harrie devoured the smooth lines of the woman's face with her gaze; drawn in helplessly by the woman’s inhuman features.

Where most mummies had a nose, this woman instead had two small slits in its place. This particular feature drawing both awe and disgust from all that had glimpsed at her—including Harrie.

But perhaps, the most startling thing of all was the ugly grimace on the woman’s face. She didn’t look peaceful like the various mummies Harrie had seen in the past. Voldemort looked displeased.

It was a curiosity—a mystery. And Harrie desperately wanted to uncover this secret. It was just impossible that this woman’s inhuman features could never have come up at all. There just had to be some sort of answer. Some sort of explanation, not only for the woman’s disfigurement, but for the angry set to her face.

Harrie was suddenly seized by the familiar urge to reach out and touch, once more.

But she restrained the desire, resistant to the idea of even pressing her fingers against the smooth barrier. Afraid that she may apply too much pressure—overcome by the strength with which the whim whispered along the back of her mind. The voice beckoned and titillated—begged that she reach out to feel the fabric clinging to Voldemort's desiccated body. It was a voice that sounded oddly like a hiss—but that in no way silenced the desire to press the shiny fabric between her dainty fingers, to gather up the material and truly _feel_ its softness against her flesh.

It was unnerving, this compulsion. But not enough to stop Harrie from drinking her fill of this mystery. She just couldn’t help herself.

Voldemort was an enigma—a grotesque image that startled any and all that came upon her. When the body had been found by the archaeologists, the world had exploded with commentaries on her total disfigurement—wondering if the woman was even human at all considering the state of her face.

Harrie had been sure that most of the disfigurement had come from the ravages of time, little to do with how the woman had actually looked in the flesh, and more to do with the onerous mummification process or perhaps, as punishment for some misdeed. Because really, what sort of person would look so monstrous in the real world?  

And not be spoken of? Harrie would think there would be passages—tales of a woman more snake than human walking across ancient Egypt.

But Harrie, in all the time she had spent obsessively looking through ancient art history on the internet, had never come across something like this. Sure, the internet was not exactly the best place to gather information, but it was certainly a good place to begin when you didn’t have a fancy degree tacked to your name. There was no mention made of a snakewoman in Egypt—the internet, for once, as silent as the Art world. She had found stories of the Goddess Renenutet and even stories of her cohort, Buto, but neither of them were hybrids—they were actual _snakes._

And no one knew a thing. No one could decipher the strange language over the hieroglyphics from what Harrie had read in the article. The mystery of both Voldemort’s appearance and her angry visage, an enigma.

It was eerie. Voldemort was like a ghost—a living myth.

And it was that mystery that compelled her to come in weeks before she was due to even visit the museum. Her curiosity too great, and if she were being honest, rivaling Hermione’s own considering the bookworm’s absence at that precise moment.

After staring at Voldemort’s sharp cheekbones, and sneering lips, Harrie knew then what she needed to do.

She wouldn’t let this mystery remain a mystery. She would hole herself in her apartment and dig through the internet for whatever lead she could find on the woman. Voldemort’s snake-like features and angry sneer just demanded that she look—that her story be uncovered.

Harrie couldn’t just let her fade. To allow this powerful woman to only be known for being an outlier in a sea of mummified corpses without some sort of explanation. Even if Harrie never planned to share such information with anyone else—this was for _her_ peace of mind.

She simply needed to know.

"Harrie, are you alright?" Harrie jolted with a start, whirling around so quickly that she was fortunate she had not fallen on her arse from the speed with which she moved.

“ _Christ_ , ‘Mione. You scared me half to death!” Harrie reproached, taking several moments to gather her bearings before turning her gaze to look at Hermione’s grinning face.

_Arse._

“Scared you, didn’t I?” Hermione teased, surveying the room for a moment before looking inside of Voldemort’s coffin. The girl’s brows furrowed together in bewilderment, and Harrie could not stop herself from grinning from ear to ear when Hermione’s confusion melted into shock.

Hermione looked like she’d lost several shades of color from her cheeks, and Harrie placed a comforting hand on her shoulder despite her chortling.

Voldemort was truly a powerful sight, if she could even scare Hermione. The girl was about as skeptical as they came, and did not scare easily at all.

“What is _that_?” Hermione breathed out, her eyes wide with unease as she stepped closer to take in more of Voldemort’s appearance. Harrie quickly removed her hand from the girl’s shoulders, watching Hermione press her face several inches above the glass.

“That is Voldemort. Spooky, isn’t she?” Harrie chirped, noting the way Hermione froze for a moment before seemingly relaxing. Hermione stared at Voldemort for several moments, before stepping away from the mummy, and turning her brown eyes back to Harrie’s face.

There was something on Hermione’s face that Harrie could not quite pinpoint. She looked spooked, certainly. But there was something in her eyes—a brightness to them that had not been there before. They glittered like diamonds underneath the fluorescent lights above them, her pupils so large that there was only a thin sliver of brown over her irises.

Harrie was at a loss for words, perturbed by just how relaxed Hermione seemed. Her eyes slanted in an almost dreamy fashion.

“Are you alright?” Harrie hedged, stepping closer to the girl. She reached out to press her hand to Hermione’s shoulder, but the girl quickly stepped back and away from Harrie’s reach. Hermione’s face breaking out into a full blown grin as she did; all remnants of her earlier discomfort disappearing from her face.

Hermione’s smile was wolfish—her teeth white and sharp. Harrie swallowed, unable to mask just how unnerved she was by Hermione’s sudden change in state. Undeniably startled by the abrupt change in her best friend.

“Never better.” Hermione responded easily, the strange glimmer in her eyes catching on the light above both their heads making her typically warm brown appear almost red.

“Are you sure you—“

“I said I was fine, Harrie. Now come on, there’s something I want to show you in the other room.” Hermione interrupted, her lips pursing into a thin line and her arms crossing over her chest. Harrie was entirely too relieved to see it, the familiarity of that gesture enough to relax the muscles she hadn’t realized she’d tensed.

“And don’t _think_ I’ve forgotten about what you did earlier.” Hermione interjected, and Harrie groaned aloud, all thought of Hermione’s strange behavior fleeing from her mind. Harrie felt Hermione’s hand clasp tightly on her arm, the pressure light, to drag her to the other part of the exhibit.

At Hermione’s smug smile, Harrie let herself be led. She knew what was coming.

_Swell._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is already complete. 
> 
> I will be posting a chapter per day.
> 
> If it is not clear why this is F/F slash. This was in the prompt.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shorter chapter and not a lot of action. Because of this, I will be posting two chapters instead of one per day.
> 
> This story was supposed to be a oneshot originally. I decided to maintain the line breaks I had created while this was still at the time meant to be as such.
> 
> The chapters will be of varying lengths. 
> 
> Enjoy, and no archived warnings apply here.

“So what did you think?” Harrie asked, reclining on her leather couch when Hermione came out from Harrie’s room, a thin book in hand.

 

Harrie tried not to sigh when she caught sight of the book, knowing well that the girl hardly went anywhere without one in hand, and leaned further back into the couch when Hermione sat down on the loveseat right across from her. There was a small coffee table right at the center, where they had placed their drinks and their plates with half-eaten sandwiches.

 

It would have been an ideal place for the girl to put the book down, but Hermione did no such thing—reaching for her beaded bag tucked right into the seat.

 

“It was…interesting.” Hermione stated, her brows scrunching together in thought as she stuffed the book into her beaded bag—the monstrosity swallowing the book up easily. Harrie was convinced the thing had to weigh at least four kilos.

 

Harrie reached for her sandwich, watching the girl closely as she dropped the bag to the ground and focused her brown eyes back on Harrie.

 

“Interesting…good or?” Harrie tried, and Hermione’s lips spread into a small grin. Her eyes were warm, and Harrie immediately relaxed upon seeing a pleased blush color her tan skin.

 

“It was beautiful, Harrie. As always. The exhibit was just as you described it.” Harrie grinned back at the girl’s smiling face, and cuddled further into the couch, utterly exhausted from a day of exploring the museum with Hermione. Going up several flights of stairs could certainly do that to anyone—even to someone as fit as herself.

 

“I especially loved that one display right outside the cavern room. The jewelry was just  _ breathtaking _ .” Hermione gushed, her eyes bright and her hands jerking excitedly as she continued to speak. “There was this one locket that I  _ wish  _ you could have seen. It was solid gold and there were interesting engravings right outside. It almost looked like an S.” Harrie listened with rapt attention as Hermione continued to ramble, the girl vibrating in her seat with energy Harrie herself could not gather.

 

“I don’t know if you managed to see it, but it was quite the relic. It was in such good shape for being stuffed a cave for almost a millennia.” Hermione stated, and Harrie nodded—trying to recall if she had indeed seen something like that when she was in Voldemort’s cavern.

 

She drew a blank—the only thing she could truly remember in great detail, the woman’s serpentine face.

 

_ Those curved cheekbones. Those thin lips. The shape of her head, and angular jaw. _

 

She could see Voldemort vividly—her face a crystalized in her brain.

 

Harrie jumped when Hermione abruptly drew her from her thoughts, the girl getting up so fast from the couch that Harrie was amazed the girl didn’t catch vertigo.

 

“Oh my goodness, Harrie. I have to run, I completely forgot I had to email something to that sodding professor.” Hermione griped, snatching her bag from the ground and nearly tripping on the coffee table as she rushed toward the front door at the opposite end of the room.

 

Harrie blinked owlishly, her mouth open, as Hermione practically flung the door open and slammed it shut on her way out before Harrie could speak.

 

Her good bye was hanging on her tongue—unsaid.

 

_ Well, that was certainly unexpected _ , Harrie mused before rising from the couch and heading to the front door, crossing the small kitchenette to her left, to lock the door.

 

Hermione really was out of it.

 

Harrie would be sure to give the girl a call the next day, just to be sure she was okay.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things pick up a bit.
> 
> Enjoy and leave comments and kudos if you like where things are heading.

Harrie pinched the bridge of her nose, counting down to one hundred and back when she had yet again been lead down a false trail.

 

She’d been looking through different forums on the internet for several days now—her sources, at this point, seeming more like conspiracy theories than actual concrete information on the mystery mummy. She knew that her best bet was to hit the library, or hell, even ask Hermione if she knew anyone in school that could point her in the right direction.

 

But that would mean leaving her apartment and actually  _ socializing  _ with complete strangers that might judge her for her strange interests.

 

Or possibly, even talked down on for being a complete novice on the subject of Egyptian mythology and culture. Which, Harrie could concede, is not wrong. But toss it, she was genuinely interested in learning more about Voldemort. She didn’t need some wanker sneering at her with an elitist attitude.

 

All she had were silly stories about mummies on Creepypasta and several speculative articles by archeologists attempting to explain away Voldemort’s serpentine appearance. It was ridiculous to see them suggest that Voldemort was the way she was because she was born with some defect. Despite, Harrie thought snidely, zero evidence to back the point up. And of course, there was still the question of whether there was even medical evidence proving that such a defect even existed in the first place.

 

_ What if it was magic?  _ Harrie thought as she turned her attention back to her bright white screen, her glasses hanging low on her face. Staring hard at the screen, Harrie noted the way the letters from the Egyptian_Mysteries forum blurred—the writing looking markedly more like gibberish the longer she stared.

 

She didn’t know how long she’d been reading, but after several long minutes of rereading the same sentence, she knew that she was making zero progress. She didn’t understand a single thing that she had just read, or even what she was even looking for.

 

It was evident that she needed to head to bed.

 

She lifted her hand to make sure that her glasses were, in fact, on her face, and sighed when she nearly knocked them out of place. She hadn’t been sleeping much since she’d returned from the exhibit, and it was growing more and more obvious that her curiosity had exploded into an obsession. 

 

But she simply had to  _ know _ , and if that meant sleeping a little less, well, it was a sacrifice she was willing to make.

 

Though, that wasn’t the sole reason she wasn’t sleeping much.

 

Harrie shuddered when she felt a familiar prickle at the nape of her neck—her arms exploding with gooseflesh as she cut her gaze away from her screen to survey her bedroom. Her eyes were staring at the open window at the opposite end, the massive tree blocking the light from the streetlight outside. She was several floors above the ground floor—four, to be precise—with no balcony.

 

There was no possible way for anyone to climb up her apartment and get in, but for some strange reason, she always felt like someone was staring at her intently. At first, Harrie had thought it was just her mind playing tricks on her.

 

But after the third day of feeling like someone was trying to consume her with their gaze, Harrie was convinced there was something strange going on.

 

She had checked beneath her bed hundreds of times, terrified and prepared for something to just leap out from underneath it. But there was always nothing—just patches of dust she had missed with her vacuum and a couple of spider webs.

 

It drove her mad, but Harrie did not really know what to do. She had already discussed the matter with Hermione when the girl had come over, and she hadn’t been very helpful. Hermione had urged her to get more sleep and simply stop researching Voldemort—that it was possibly stress making her feel the way she was.

 

Harrie did not feel stressed, however. Exhausted, but that was certainly no cause for alarm. She hadn’t even started her classes for her CKP certificate, and wouldn’t have to worry about that until at least two months from now.

 

So all this talk about stress was complete rubbish.

Harrie sagged in her chair when the prickling finally abated, her gaze cutting to the time on her laptop before releasing a tired groan.

 

It was almost 3 a.m.

 

Harrie should have been in bed a few hours ago.

 

She shut her laptop without bothering to power it off, unwilling to close out the fifty tabs she had open. She wouldn’t lose the links, having set up her browser so that it reopened her last opened tabs, but she didn’t want to lose her place in the thread.

 

The thing was massive.

 

Some of it, although not the most illuminating, did provide some kernel of knowledge for her to research on her own. There was a mess of papers right by laptop with notes on the different mythos for serpents. It was honestly a miracle she even understood her handwriting with how sloppy it was—her scrawl butchering the English language.

 

She rose from her chair, the plastic creaking loudly as she did, before turning her attention to her unmade bed. Her sheets were in complete disarray, one pillow tossed carelessly on the ground while the other was somehow at the bottom end where her feet generally were. The top sheet was wrinkled at the far end where the mislaid pillow was, and her comforter was almost entirely at the top half of the bed where she rested her head.

 

Her mum would have a heart attack if she saw this.

 

She tucked her chair back beneath her small corner desk, and laid a hand on the smooth cotton sheets. Reveling in the texture, Harrie threw herself onto her bed. The mattress protested loudly, the creak of bedsprings loud in the silence that had fallen in the room.

 

She was lying horizontally on the bed, her feet hanging over the end of it.

 

Normally, she’d bundle herself in at least several layers of bedding. But she was exhausted and it was too hot in the room. The summer heat was in full swing and although her parents were generous enough to pay for her apartment while she was away at school, the air conditioning was running poorly. She’d complained enough about it with the landlord, but nothing had yet to come of that.

 

She hoped it would get resolved soon. It had already been a couple days, and although it certainly wasn’t too bad at night, the afternoons were blistering.

 

She didn’t know how long she’d been laying on her bed, her oversized T-shirt just barely covering her thighs as she laid there. She’d almost dozed off when she felt rather than heard the door to her bedroom creak open. She jolted, rolling up with her glasses askew on her face.

 

The door was wide open, but there was no one there.

 

Harrie was sure that she had closed it earlier, remembering vividly that she had nearly caught her finger on it in her rush to get started on her research that evening. She had hung out with Hermione earlier in the afternoon and had completely lost track of time.

 

She rose from her bed, ignoring the creak of the springs being jostled with her movement, as she crept to the door. Her bare feet touching the plush carpet as she crossed the short space to the door. She reached out for the knob, hesitating only for a short second when she was several centimeters away from touching it, before enclosing her hand around the smooth metal and shutting the door.

 

The metal was warm, as if someone had closed their hand around it and held onto it for longer than a minute.

 

Harrie felt a shiver crawl up her spine at that, thoroughly spooked as she tried to make sense of just what was happening.

 

Her heart was beating rapidly in her chest, her mind racing through thoughts a mile a minute, wondering just who could have possibly been there with her, as she tried to process the fact that her door had bloody  _ opened  _ by itself and that it the normally cold metal was warm rather than cold. 

 

She was more a little spooked if she was being honest.

 

She didn’t know how long she’d been holding onto the knob, but after several minutes, Harrie hastily released it and whirled around to look in her room. Dread lodged painfully in her throat.

 

Everything was just as she had left it.

 

Her bed was still rumpled, and her desk was still a complete mess. Her cupboard was wide open—thankfully—and her bathroom door was ajar with the shower curtain hiding away the bathtub. No one could have possibly gone in through her bathroom without Harrie not having heard nor seen them—her head face the bathroom when she had been trying to fall asleep.

 

But that still left her bed.

 

It was ludicrous to even consider checking beneath her bed. Downright mad that she was edging back to it, and placing her knees down on the carpet to make sure.

 

Harrie knew that it was senseless, shouting and complaining to herself in the back of her mind as she leant further over, pushing her glasses into place when they fell too low on her face.

 

However, there was something in her gut screaming at her to see for herself. An itch in her brain that wouldn’t settle no matter how badly she tried to quell it. It was an unnamed voice that sounded oddly like her own—a more primal, instinct drive side to her that urged her to be sure that she was in fact alone.

 

Harrie laid on the floor for several minutes, attempting to convince herself that there was in fact  _ nothing  _ under the bed. Her brow furrowed and her lips set into a grim line as she struggled with herself, trying to convince herself that there surely was nothing there. That she shouldn’t to look underneath it again. She did this at least twice a day as it was; she was quickly getting tired of this.

 

_ But what if there was actually something under the bed? The door did move all by itself. _

 

Harrie sighed, resigned to the logic—or to be fair, the absolute lack of it—and looked beneath it.

 

There was nothing.

 

It was unnerving blackness—similar to the one she had caught herself in when she had found the closed off part of the exhibit.

 

Harrie squinted in hopes of making anything out, but there was no identifying a single thing.

 

Relieved, Harrie rose back to her feet and laid back down on the bed.

 

Her heart was still beating much too quickly for her liking as she laid on the mattress, breathing in slowly to settle her anxiety.

 

_ There was nothing in the room, Harrie. _

 

_ There’s nothing there, Harrie. _ , she repeated to herself viciously, staring hard at the door. Her paranoia sitting heavily on her mind as she eyed the door.

 

She didn’t know how long she had laid like this, apprehension swimming through her veins. But after some time, Harrie felt her eyes begin to droop. Her exhaustion collapsing her bones and sweeping away the voice whispering for her to keep looking—to  _ not  _ look away.

 

She knew she was fighting a useless battle—she had woken up too early in the morning that day, nearly 6 a.m. Her body was ready for sleep, and although she was scared to fall asleep, she was also too tired to be dealing with this nonsense.

 

It was in the world between awareness and slumber that Harrie caught sight of bright red eyes in the dark. The color swimming in the shadows, like stars shining brightly beneath the inky blue of the night sky.

 

Harrie remembered being terrified and awed all at once, disbelief seizing her like a vice, before she was swept away by a sudden wave of exhaustion. Her thoughts dying down to a murmur and her heart settling into a more reasonable pace, and her fear forgotten as her eyes finally closed and sleep took her.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And onwards with the hijinks.
> 
> Please mind the weird formatting for hyphens. For some reason Google Docs does not want to cooperate with making them so you have a mix of hyphen and "--"

She never saw the red eyes again, but she could never forget the way they had looked in the darkness. Like rubies beneath the bright light of the dawning sun--glittering beautifully despite the terrifying implications of seeing them.

 

It had taken her some time to convince herself that it had not been real. Hours of turning around corners, or of looking closely at the mirror in her bathroom, to make sure that there wasn’t something terrifying popping from behind the glass.

 

Harrie was convinced she was going absolutely mad.

 

But she had to be  _ sure.  _

 

She couldn’t be at peace--devote herself to her research with such an oppressive weight hanging over her shoulders. And so, she searched every corner--slept only when she had checked all doors were locked, and all windows were secure, before even thinking of research. 

 

It was only once she was convinced that nothing was hiding in the darkened corners of her flat, that Harrie finally was able her focus back to Voldemort.

 

And it certainly brought her immense peace following the scare.

 

She was holed up in her room again, her desk a complete mess with stacks of paper covering the entire surface, save for her laptop. She was digging deeper into the forums, shocked and pleased that the forum had exploded with more useful information about Voldemort since one of the researchers published a new finding about Voldemort.

 

Apparently, Voldemort, for all her riches and grandeur, had not been a kind woman. Or at least, she had to have done  _ something  _ to have earned the kind of death that she had suffered. Harrie’s observation of the woman’s look of contempt was evidence enough that she had not been given the peaceful death many of the other mummies had received.

 

Voldemort, from what the archeologist had gleaned when they examined her body, had been mummified while she was still alive. The woman had been sedated, put into a heavy slumber before they had wrapped her up in their finest cloths and jewels, and tossed her into the sarcophagus. The encasing more a prison than anything else when they tucked her away with no means for escape.

 

The coffin could not be opened from the inside—several of the images inscribed on the outside both warning and instructing those that dared open her confinement, to be careful with her. To be mindful of the fact that awakening her could be the ultimate destruction of society as they knew it.

 

It sounded like total rubbish at first—like complete nonsense considering the researchers had nothing else to go on but the hieroglyphics they managed to translate. There was still no explanation to the look of veneration and adoration in the faces of the white-faced women, and no one had yet to decipher just what the strange language weaving beneath the women’s feet were.

 

There was certainly a story there, and Harrie would stop at nothing until she found out what that was.

 

Though, that was not quite why she was convinced she was losing her bloody mind. 

 

As riveting as Voldemort was, she was not the reason why Harrie’s thoughts were scattered--of why she felt as if she were trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle with a piece missing from the collection. Voldemort, for all her beauty, could not distract her from her own tumultuous emotions--could not quite give her back the peace she’d been lacking as of late. Though it definitely worked more often than not.

 

It was again late in the evening—nearly 2 a.m.—and she had yet to go to bed. A strange prickling in the back of her head like a physical touch, drawing shivers of deep revulsion up her spine.

 

Since the door had opened all by itself, things had settled. The prickling at the nape of her neck still commonplace as she researched Voldemort, or mostly, did anything in the flat. But she was slowly adjusting to it, even though it wasn’t really something she  _ should  _ be getting used to. 

 

She knew it was stupid, but she needed to finish her research. Paying mind to this small inconvenience was not going to get her anywhere, and she couldn’t afford to be distracted now. Anyone else, she knew, would have done something about it already. And she was almost tempted to, but  _ Voldemort. _

 

There was something holding her back just as much as it repelled her. An itch beneath her skin that urged her to remain, a promise hanging in the air that she could not name. It fed her need to focus on Voldemort, and Harrie, unable to resist, did just that. It compelled her to focus on researching Voldemort rather than on the strange occurrences in her flat, and Harrie permitted it.

 

Only because it was minor. Inconsequential compared to the secrets Voldemort housed. She had assured to herself time and time again.

 

But this evening, things had certainly taken a turn.

 

The prickling was there, but there was now a strange scratching noise. A sound that had started up just a few minutes before she’d found the published article on Voldemort.

 

At first, Harrie did not make much of it. She did live in an apartment with neighbors, and unfortunately did not live at the topmost floor either, so she definitely heard her fair share of strange things at all hours.

 

But this, well, this was certainly something.

 

The scratching, when Harrie swiveled around in her chair to look out the lone window at the end of her room, had grown unbearably loud. It was similar to what pressing a nail against a chalkboard sounded like—grating and painful to her ears.

 

She couldn’t concentrate on reading through the forum with how loud the noise was, and Harrie, knowing when she had to call it quits, shut her laptop. She knew that she wasn’t going to make any progress with all the bloody noise, and so, she decided to simply stop for the night and give her neighbor a piece of her mind.

 

It was almost 3 a.m., just what the bloody fuck was the man doing?

 

She grumbled a terse curse, slipping on a pair of sweatpants she had left on her bed, and put on her lion slippers. It had been a gift from her mum, and although Harrie would never be caught dead wearing those outside of her apartment, she was making an exception this night. Harrie couldn’t take much more of the noise, and she definitely wasn’t going to put on sneakers just to yell at her neighbor.

 

She slipped past her bedroom door, ignoring the way it squeaked, before padding down to the front door to her right. Her flat was completely dark, save for the clock lights and the microwave announcing with bright neon colors that it was, in fact, too late for this bullshite.

 

The life of the university student was definitely bollocks.

 

Harrie was angry, her lips pursed into a line and her fists clenched into fists as she padded through her flat, her patience dwindling. She didn’t care that she looked like shite--that her shoulder-length hair was wild and untamed, sticking out above her head and tangled. Her neighbor can go suck it if he had anything to say about it; he wouldn’t have to see it if he weren’t being such a loud wanker.

 

She unlocked her door before removing the dead-bolt, and slipped outside. The ugly yellow light above casting the room in weird shadows and in an unearthly glow.

 

Harrie turned to her left to the neighbor’s door and padded down for a couple feet until she stopped right in front of it.

 

It was oddly silent.

 

Harrie frowned, unsure.

 

_ Could he have stopped? _

 

Harrie sighed before finding the courage to knock on the door. She might as well, she had already walked out of her apartment.

 

Nothing. Harrie could not hear a single noise from beyond the wood.

 

Waiting for several minutes, Harrie sighed again before knocking once more. Annoyed that she was forced to be here, but unwilling to leave until she at least told her neighbor to keep it down.

 

There was a soft click, and then the door was slammed open with more force than Harrie thought was necessary.The wood slammed against the wall with enough force to rattle the walls, and Harrie knew just then, that her neighbor was going to be an arsehole.

 

Her neighbor, a dark haired man with a large pointed nose was staring at her behind beady, angry eyes. He was in overly large pajamas, and his feet were also adorned with slippers.

 

If looks could kill, Harrie would have been dead three times over. 

 

His eyes were narrowed into thin slits, his mouth set in a grim line that belied just how displeased the man was. 

 

He looked like someone had pissed in his drink.

 

Her frown deepened, her own annoyance stoked by the audacity the man had to give  _ her  _ of all people that face. He was the one making all sorts of sounds at night. If anyone was more entitled to being angry, it was most certainly her.

 

“Do you realize what  _ time  _ it is?” The man stressed the word time as if Harrie were some sort of idiot. His sneer made Harrie return an angry glower of her own, unable to curb her own irritation at being interrupted from her research.

 

“I don’t know, arsehole. Maybe it’s  _ you  _ that doesn’t know the time. What the hell are you doing making so much noise at this hour? People are trying to sleep,” Harrie retorted, watching the man’s anger melt into confusion, seemingly thrown by her remark, before his anger returned, full force.

 

“What are you talking about? I am  _ sleeping _ . Well, I  _ was  _ until you started pounding on my door with about as much tact as a cow,” the man shot back, and Harrie felt her eye twitch. She was trying very hard not to punch the man in the face, her knuckles white with how tightly she was clenching her fists.

 

Harrie needed to calm down. She was upset lately because she hadn’t been sleeping much and shite had been strange in her apartment. It wasn’t this man’s fault, but sod it, his temper was not helping her maintain a level head.

 

_ Deep breaths, Harrie. _

 

“Oh? Are you saying you’re not the one making that god awful scratching noise?” Harrie ignored the man’s jab in favor of questioning him, watching the man’s cheeks flush furiously with his irritation.

 

“ _ No, you silly girl! _ ” The man yelled before slamming the door shut in her face, the sound of heavy footsteps moving away from the door going on for several seconds before cutting off.

 

_ Wow. _

 

Harrie stood there with her mouth open for several minutes, not quite comprehending the fact that not only was the man a complete arsehole, but that the man looked genuinely confused regarding her accusations. Her neighbor was in his sleepwear; it was definitely not a lie that he had been lying in bed.

 

But what of the noise? She certainly had a few more neighbors down the hall. However, the more she thought of it, the more she wondered about the fact that if she  _ was _ hearing that noise, then surely her neighbors were be able to hear it as well.

 

It was the curse of living in an apartment complex, after all.

 

But what  _ if  _ she was the only one? This...perturbed her.

 

Harrie shoved all thought of her own mounting unease and the noise from her mind, then. Disturbed, but choosing to ignore it. She didn’t want to think of just what that meant, and so, she didn’t. It was late and if she focused on such things, she’d be too wired to sleep. Too afraid to close her eyes when she should really be resting for the following day.

 

With that thought, she turned away from the stupid man’s door, and headed to her own.

 

She listened for the strange scratching noise as she moved. Her ears straining, but there was not a sound. Her footsteps and her own shallow breaths were the only sounds that broke the heavy silence that had fallen around her.

 

It was eerie. The silence more reminiscent of a graveyard than an apartment complex.

 

She stopped once she made it to her door, lingering there for a moment as she gathered her thoughts, and then opened it, letting light from the hall cast the room with an eerie glow. It made her hesitate—to consider for a moment if everything was exactly as it should be.

 

Dread teased along her senses, the vision of normalcy doing nothing to quell the way her stomach churned unpleasantly. 

 

Her small dining table was to her left, cluttered with boxes she had yet to unpack, and a wooden cabinet that was filled to the brim with books and different figurines she had purchased from the museum after each visit. To her right, the small kitchenette was the complete opposite. It was impeccable—the marble table wiped clean of grime, with plates all stacked in an orderly fashion by the sink. The bright neon clock light from the microwave announced that she had argued with her neighbor for precisely ten minutes, and that it was now, 4 a.m.

 

At the center of the room was her tiny living room, her leather couch and loveseat separated by the small coffee table she often dined on.

 

Nothing looked out of place. Everything was in relative order.

 

And the strange scratching noise was gone.

 

If she wasn’t sure before, she was definitely sure now that she needed to talk to her landlady.

 

Harrie couldn’t take a repeat of this. The staring was already more than she could handle, she didn’t need the strange scratching noises at odd hours in the night as well. 

 

Since she had come from the museum, everything had been turned on its arse. She didn’t know what to make of the strange occurrences--pulled in two separate directions by her instincts screaming for her to run and the rational side of her mind--a voice that sounded disturbingly like Hermione--telling her that this was not  _ real. _

 

She didn’t know what to do, and so, determined right then and there that she would at least speak to the landlady, as unpleasant as such a thing was. It was unlikely that the woman would do anything short of waving Harrie’s concerns aside, but it was better than doing nothing at all. 

 

It was reassuring, even. Irritating, but a comfort nevertheless.

 

And if the situation got worse, well, then she’d simply take more drastic measures. Some scratching and staring was nothing. 

 

It was minute. Innocuous, even.

 

Easily something she could handle.

 

Convinced and reassured by the soundness of her plan, Harrie finally stepped inside with a deep breath, and closed the door softly behind her.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I realized that I needed to post two instead of one chapter today because reasons.
> 
> You will all learn why at the end of this journey.
> 
> I hope you all enjoy.

She didn’t get to see her landlady the following day.

 

Harrie had been so busy that she’d completely forgotten to do just that. Still half asleep when Hermione started pounding on her front door, and that, certainly wasn’t something anything anyone wanted to deal with first thing in the morning.

 

She’d planned to ignore it, to simply burrow herself into her sheets and forget about the bushy haired girl right outside her door, but when Harrie’s phone came to life with Hermione’s caller ID flashing on her screen, she knew for a fact that such a feat would be impossible.

 

_ Goddamn it. _

 

She knew what this meant.

 

Harrie had dragged herself out of bed, slipping her glasses over her nose, and padded to her door, resigned to her fate. She had barely managed to get the front door open before Hermione was shoving her aside and storming into the room. Her friend’s excitement so palpable that Harrie could not find it in herself to be annoyed that she hadn’t slept that entire night, worried that the unexplainable noise would start up again.

 

_ She’s lucky I love her. _

 

Harrie only just managed to slip into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt when Hermione, jumping and vibrating intensely with excitement, pulled her along outside of her flat—the door slamming shut with more force than necessary on their way out. Harrie could make out Hermione’s gushing, her excited tone muttering “new bookstore” and “several streets from my place” like a mantra as she was dragged further down the hall and towards the stairs rather than the elevators.

 

_ Can’t even have the decency to take the elevators knowing how tired I am. Rude. _

 

Harrie had no idea where this bloody bookstore was, but the mention that it was near ‘Mione’s place definitely supplied some pieces to the mystery.

 

Though why Hermione had driven from her flat to hers when her place was clearly just a couple streets down made no bloody sense to her.

 

Harrie wanted to protest—truly, she did—but at sight Hermione’s quelling glower, she clicked her mouth shut and let herself be led away. It didn’t matter that Harrie lived a little under 20 minutes from the girl’s place. Or that her friend had driven in the exact opposite direction than where the little store was located. The impracticality of the whole thing made Harrie want groan out loud, but she knew better than to get in the way of Hermione and a possibly new find. 

 

Harrie watched Hermione hail a taxi with an impatient wave of her hand, and bit back a complaint when she was dragged out onto the sidewalk.

 

She wanted to tell the girl that it was too early in the morning for this, that she had research to do. And she almost did just that, the words at the tip of her tongue, but then Hermione was moving Harrie along too fast for her to process what was even happening. Hermione had shoved her into the taxi before she could string two words together, air whooshing out of her lungs when her back hit the seat abruptly.

 

Harrie was not happy, but she couldn’t really hold it against Hermione. Harrie had done this exact thing not too long ago, and so, with that in mind, she smartly kept her mouth shut about the whole thing and let herself be led. She’d allow Hermione this day.

 

After all, nothing a bit of coffee could not fix.

 

Harrie wanted to cry out in relief when Hermione finally set her free. She was in worse shape than she had been before she had been dragged along for the trip. She had at least two new bruises and one new blister after the day, and it sucked. And if that hadn’t been bad enough, her arm was sore from having to shove people aside, and her clothes were dirty from when she’d been tripped by some arsehole at the store.

 

The sun was hanging low over the horizon when she had finally hired the taxi; the sight of the massive star disappearing into the ground evidence that she’d been out for longer than she had wanted.

 

It was certainly a blessing to see the taxi drive up beside her--the comforting rumble of the engine urging her forward and into the backseat before she even thought about it, her mouth parting to give the driver her address before burrowing deeply into the leather seat. 

 

And then, silence. Brilliant and relaxing silence.

 

The peace she found while tucked away in the seat was a complete contrast to the excitement with which Hermione had yanked her out of her flat, and Harrie was more than a little grateful that the driver did not think to make small talk. She was barely hanging on to her consciousness, and that was certainly saying something. 

 

The drive was a reprieve from having to deal with crowds of eager customers swarming into the store—their bodies too close and suffocating as she tried to wade through them with Hermione’s elbows pressed against her ribs. It was definitely not how she wanted to spend her Saturday morning, but she’d do it again if it made Hermione happy.

 

That was really the bright side to the whole thing, considering she hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her friend since their trip to the museum.

Her ride back home was quick and uneventful. The vibrations of the car moving through the streets comforting as she stared out the window; watching the apartments and trees that zoomed past until she caught sight of her own apartment complex just several feet away.

 

Harrie was ready to hole herself in her room—the promise of a nap before getting back to business, growing more and more tempting. 

 

Once the taxi stopped, Harrie paid the man and slipped out of the seat without thought. Her body moved, but Harrie’s mind was absent.

 

And then, she was at her door. All memory of her walk to her door a blur.

 

Harrie sighed blissfully when she finally slipped into her apartment, closing and locking the door behind her. She tossed her keys to the kitchen table and collapsed on the couch as soon as she arrived, relief thrumming beneath her skin at finally being able to sit down.

 

Her feet ached.  Her toes felt crushed after some boy stepped on them at the crowded bookstore. It had hurt, her sneakers no match for the steel-toed boots the boy had been wearing.

 

_ Who wears bloody boots out in the middle of summer anyway?  _ It made no sense to her, even now as she rubbed her aching foot.

 

It was honestly a shock she hadn’t lost a toe, but things could definitely had turned out worse. Though, that didn’t stop her from grumbling audibly as she slipped her foot out of her shoe to survey the damage. It was swollen and red where the brunt of the kid’s weight had settled.

 

It looked like absolute shite.

 

She wiggled her toes to make sure that it was fine. Satisfied when no sharp pain shot up the appendage, Harrie slipped off her other shoe before she pressed more comfortably into the couch, exhaustion crashing over her form. She could easily fall asleep if she allowed it. The cushion beneath her arse felt heavenly after standing for lord knows how long.

 

Her eyes fluttered closed, the blissful darkness behind her lids beckoning for her to take a short cat nap before heading back to her desk and renewing her research. It certainly couldn’t hurt—a short nap at 7 in the evening will be just what she needed. She knew for a fact she wasn’t going to be getting much sleep at night, anyway. So she might as well.

 

With that reasonable plan in mind, Harrie pulled off her hair tie and slipped her glasses from her face, before laying both on the coffee table inches away. She then settled further into the couch, bare feet hanging over the edge as she waited for slumber to claim her, her eyes finally slipping shut.

 

And then, just as she was dozing off, Harrie heard a soft noise.

 

It was minimal. Something she herself would not have noticed before.

 

But after the days she’d been having, the sound pulled her away from the soothing grip of sleep. The soft hiss-like noise, now that Harrie thought about it, coming directly from her bedroom—

 

_ Her bedroom. _

 

Harrie moved so quickly off the couch she was shocked she hadn’t made herself dizzy on the way up, running to her closed bedroom door and slamming it open to get a glimpse of whatever it was that made the noise.

 

The room was empty—her bed unmade and her desk still a travesty.

 

Just as she had left it that morning.

 

The sound was gone, but the feeling of unease curling up Harrie’s spine remained. The uncertainty of whatever it was leaving a bad taste in her mouth as she tried to calm her distress.

 

She was certain she had heard it. She could not possibly be making this up.

 

The sound had been so distinct that Harrie, if she tried, could likely pick it out amongst the sea of noises out in the street below. It was almost like a hiss, now that Harrie thought more clearly on it, the notes of it like the serpents she had used to see when she would often visit the zoo with her parents—their tongues licking at the clear glass when they gazed back at her own curious face.

 

She was perturbed by it—the hairs on her arms standing on end because it was one thing to hear that sound at a zoo, but entirely another in her  _ flat. _

 

Though, arguably, the sound was not  _ quite  _ like the hissing of a snake. This noise was significantly higher pitched than the snakes Harrie had heard in the zoo; the sound grating and capable of eliciting a shudder in even the bravest of souls. It didn’t sound like anything she’d ever heard before—no animal coming to mind that fit the mold.

 

Harrie did not know what to make of this. Shaken and confused as she was by the entire affair.

 

She walked further into her bedroom and shot her gaze to the left where her closet laid open. Her shoes were scattered all on the floor, a pile of shirts and dresses shoved into the rack. She winced at the sight.

 

She padded towards it and squinted her eyes, recalling just then that she’d left her glasses back in the living room. She was unsure of what she was even looking for, but she looked inside the closet nevertheless, the edges of her poor vision making it difficult to note a single thing.

 

After several minutes of staring, her unease abating somewhat after finding nothing, Harrie slumped her shoulders and headed to the opposite side of the room towards her bathroom, the small window glowing a bright orange yellow from the street light outside. The door was ajar, and there was a faint light spilling from inside indicating that Harrie had failed at some point to shut off the light.

 

She groaned, already knowing that her landlady was going to give her shite for it. Light was covered in her monthly fee, but that did not mean that she could abuse the privilege as she liked. The lady was like a bloodhound, easily sniffing out offenders that broke the few rules she had set into place.

 

It was unnerving and more than a little annoying, and Harrie twisted her lips into a grimace when she entered her small bathroom and shut off the light.

 

She was just about to close the door when she heard something clatter to the ground by the opposite side of the bathroom—the sound almost like a gunshot going off in an enclosed space. Harrie jumped, and turned the light back on.

 

She looked around the room, her heart beating a mile a minute and her hands clammy with sweat as she took in the space.

 

The room was big enough to fit two people comfortably. It was nothing compared to her bathroom back at home, but she certainly wasn’t complaining when it had pretty decent water pressure and a tub for pretty good rent. Many of the apartments she had scoped out lacked those features, or, were so bloody expensive that Harrie would have had to sell a limb through the black market to be able to afford it.

 

Her flat wasn’t her parent’s cottage, but the apartment was her home until she could officially afford to live on her own without her parent’s paying for her living expenses. She’d live with her shite arrangements for now, but as soon as she became a cop, well, she was kissing the place goodbye.

 

She stepped onto the bathroom carpet, glancing at the toilet as best as she could without her glasses, before crouching to open the cabinet right underneath the sink.

 

Nothing. Just the white shapes of her mounds of soaps and skin-care products.

 

Harrie released a breath she did not know she was holding and rose after she shut the cabinet, turning her attention then to the tub and reaching for the shower curtain with trembling fingers. She inhaled deeply, steeling her nerves because she refused to be petrified over nothing, and yanked the plastic to one side.

 

Nothing there either.

 

Harrie visibly relaxed when she didn’t find either an axe murderer ready to whack her or a giant serpent ready to sink its fangs into her arm. Instead, Harrie found that her bottle of shampoo had fallen off its perch. The shower caddy slightly upturned—looking ready to collapse on itself from the sheer weight of the varying hair products she’d loaded onto the thing.

 

She reached down and scooped the bottle, placing the shampoo back in its place as best she could in that same motion. She eyed the caddy critically, her brows furrowing in thought, before she closed the shower curtain and turned her attention back to her bedroom. The room, now, darker than she remembered.

 

_ “Thiiiiiiiiiiief.” _

 

Harrie screamed, whirling around to where she was convinced she’d heard the noise in the bathroom, to find nothing. She’d nearly torn the shower curtain from the pole, her hand reaching out to grab onto whatever it was that had spoken.

 

But there was nothing. She was alone.

 

_ What the f— _

 

She was breathing harshly through her mouth, her wide eyes surveying the bathroom to make sense of what just bloody happened. She was sure someone had spoken just now—she wasn’t mad. 

 

It was unmistakable.

 

It was the sound of a female voice—one she had never heard before.

 

It was so high pitched that Harrie was sure it could shatter glass. Harrie was trying not to panic, her heart beating so quickly it felt ready to burst. The voice had been snake-like—the hiss so easily melding the syllables together that Harrie, if she wasn’t ready to pass out—would have found it pretty. It was melodic, the tone a soft croon despite the heavy accusation in its hiss.

 

Frantically, she looked around her bathroom, expecting something to jump out of her, before her nerves finally settled down. The silence and the stillness of the room proving to her then that there was nothing there with her. It forced her to think more rationally on the matter—to calm her breathing because her vision was blurring more than it usually did. Her panic easily strangling what little air she held in her lungs.

 

She exhaled deeply, reciting to herself that there was nothing there, and squard her shoulders. She was just tired—her obsession with Voldemort and her research on serpents was just severely affecting her mind. It wasn’t unheard of for these things to happen.

 

She took long, even breaths through her mouth—cutting her gaze around the room once more before forcing her shoulders to relax, and failing miserably. Her shoulders felt as tight as a rubber band pulled taut—ready to snap with just the slightest movement. She  _ normally _ liked the feeling of adrenaline coursing through her veins—of the endorphins thrumming beneath her skin when she pushed herself beyond her limits when exercising.

 

However, the butterflies in her stomach, just then, did not feel pleasant at all. And for once, Harrie just wanted to get some sleep and simply forget about the whole mess.

 

It was several long minutes before Harrie finally convinced herself to move away from where she’d pressed herself in the bathroom— her death grip on the shower curtain slowly easing until she finally unlatched the digits from the plastic.

 

_ Come on Harrie. It’ll be fine _ , Harrie thought with conviction, her heart still beating quickly.

 

She slowly began to relax, concentrating on soothing the trembling of her shoulders, of easing the strain at her neck, and calming the rapid pace of her heart, until it was a faint buzz. It wasn’t until she had completely tucked away her unease that Harrie found the courage to walk out of the bathroom and shut off the light.

 

The door clicked shut behind, and Harrie moved back to her bedroom.

 

She didn’t know how long she stood with her back to the door, forcing her body to relax and her mind to settle into a more manageable state. The seconds melted into minutes, and the minutes into hours. Her survival instinct refused to stop its incessant shouting until she forced it to heel.

 

It was completely out of character for her to be this frightened—pushed beyond the usual level of unease she typically felt when presented with a new situation. It left a bad taste in Harrie’s mouth, disappointment and irritation blooming in her gut that she’d reverted back to a terrified child at being presented with something unknown.

 

Harrie shouldn’t be this scared. She hadn’t been sleeping well, she knew this. Those sorts of things always tended to negatively affect one’s mental health. She had heard enough about such things from Hermione to know that she was making a small thing into a bigger deal than it was.

 

_ But what if? _

 

The traitorous voice whispered into her mind, and Harrie shoved the panic into a tiny corner in her brain. Refusing to let it overtake her again as it had done once already.

 

She didn’t know how long she was struggling with herself, but after convincing herself that she was being an idiot, Harrie stepped away from the door and headed back to her living room to snatch up her glasses.

 

When her fingers closed around the familiar wire rims, Harrie felt what little tension she hadn’t managed to wrangle out, leave her. She slipped the frames over her face, and the world was immediately clearer.

 

She turned away from her living room and headed immediately for her desk. All thought of sleep long since abandoned.

 

She settled onto her rolling chair, feeling the familiar leather press against her back, and opened her laptop. The device immediately whirred to life, and her tabs loaded on the screen.

 

She paused at the sight of a bright red flag on her browser, and then she felt great excitement overtake her. It curled in her belly, easily replacing all memory of the disembodied voice.

 

An article had been released about Voldemort.

 

She clicked on the link and was floored by the first image that flashed on the screen. Awe-struck, Harrie could not stop herself from staring. Her green eyes consumed by the picture taking up the whole screen.

 

It was Voldemort’s mummy—just as she remembered seeing her. The sharpness of her cheek bones, the hard set to her jaw, the look of displeasure, and the serpentine features twinning with seemingly human features floored her. She was captivated. It reminded Harrie of why she was so interested in learning about her in the first place—her ethereal beauty just as haunting now as it had been then.

 

She looked anything but peaceful and anything but human. She was striking attired in her regalia—and Harrie shot her gaze to the text beneath the image to devour the new information.

 

Apparently a new expert had been brought in to translate the hieroglyphics.

 

The previous man, oddly enough, had died in a car accident just hours prior to the publishing of the article. He had been driving down the London Highway with his family when he was hit by a semi-truck, the hit killing him on impact. His family had barely survived the crash, but—from what Harrie had gathered—they were currently at the hospital getting treatment.

 

That expert was good at what he did, and had definitely been making good progress with his translations.

 

It was a shame, indeed.

 

Though, what Harrie did not understand, as she read through the details of incident, was how this tragic story was pertinent to Voldemort’s body. It wasn’t possible that people were already spreading rumors that Voldemort’s tomb was somehow curse—

 

Harrie paused, her mouth drying up, as she read further until there were no more words left to share.

 

Dr. Dumbledore was not the first man to have been taken. It seemed that there was a previous archeologist—the man that was credited with finding the body—lost to Voldemort’s alleged curse. The man had been found dead as well. Dr. Slughorn had died of some bizarre strain of malaria several days after he’d extracted Voldemort’s body from her tomb and shipped her off with several of her relics to London.

 

It was eerie. Similar to the stories Harrie had heard about King Tutankhamen’s own dark history.

 

_ Could Voldemort’s tomb be cursed?  _

 

_ Could a Pharaoh’s curse really apply to Voldemort, though? _

 

Harrie wanted to scoff, but she shoved her skepticism aside, wondering when exactly she turned into Hermione, before clicking out of the article and refreshing the forum tab.

 

Harrie was immediately bombarded with newer postings. The text ranging from relatively calm discussions on the issue at hand to more volatile, panicked reactions to the reporting.

 

Harrie pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose, knowing that this evening was not going to be productive gauging from the flurry of responses on the thread.

 

If she hadn’t been distracted for most of the day, Harrie could have salvaged some of the day to peruse and uncover just where she could read. She already had a stack of Egyptian books sitting on her table in the living room. All she wanted was bit of direction.

 

She scrolled down the thread, and after seeing another conspiracy theory pop up, Harrie, with a resigned purse of her lips, shut her laptop.

 

She swiveled around in her chair to face her bed, the messy sheets looking more tempting than ever in that second—especially after a night of shite sleep and fighting off angry people at the shops. The dim light from the window cast a seemingly heavenly glow on the mattress, and Harrie knew right then that she was just going to sleep.

 

Her bed wasn’t the most comfortable—her couch far superior to her mattress. But that did not mean, however, that Harrie did not want to lay in her bed.

 

A soft surface was a soft surface, after all.

 

With her distress long forgotten, Harrie quickly slipped out of her jeans. A sigh of relief leaving her lips when the fabric fell away, and Harrie felt cool air against her naked legs. It was heavenly—the freedom that came when one simply removed one’s jeans after a long day, delicious. She slid her fingers across her back to remove her bra, and released a relieved exhale when her breasts were freed.

 

It was the best feeling in the world. Easily rivaling the flavor of fresh baked treacle tarts, though she would be hard-pressed at coming to a decision on which of the two was better. Both were, without a doubt, amazing.

 

Harrie slid between her sheets, shoving the thicker comforter away with a strong kick, before she laid her head on the pillow. She relaxed into the cotton, breathing in the smell of freshly laundered sheets. It reminded her of her room back home, and she inhaled more deeply to take in more of the comforting scent. Like baby powder and jade.

 

She then slipped her glasses from her nose, shooting her arm out to toss them on the small nightstand by her bed, and burrowed further into her sheets once she felt them land on the surface.

 

_ Yes. Sleep. _

 

Harrie was straddling the line between awareness and slumber when she heard the voice again. The sound so soft and gentle that Harrie almost missed it.

 

“ _ Ssssoon, ssssweet little thief.” _

 

Harrie felt her heart race, her stomach dropping to her ankles at the sound.

 

She didn’t know how long she laid out on her bed, but she could not shake off the words. Her fear and anxiety thick in her mind as she tried to will herself to rest.

 

It would be a miracle if she managed to sleep at all after hearing something like that.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alright, we've hit the turning point. Enjoy, and please remember to leave comments or kudos.

First thing the following day, Harrie was pounding on the landlady’s door.

 

She didn’t get much sleep that entire night—dozing in and out of consciousness whenever something so much as quivered in her bedroom.

 

She was convinced she was going mad. The scratching in the room starting up right before her brain could drift off—her phone screen reading 3 a.m. the second time it had come that evening. 

 

Harrie had been determined to sleep, ready to shove her head beneath the pillow to at least get some sleep before she harassed the landlady.

 

But then the whispering began. 

 

The voice like a hissing serpent crooning threats into her ears—some of the words recognizable and others melding with the growling sounds.

 

It sounded like metal scratching along a fine glass,grating and unwarranted as she tried with all her might to ignore it through most of the night.

 

Her efforts were abysmal at best.

 

So it came as no surprise all when Harrie found herself right outside the landlady’s door with her nerves completely shot.

 

She was beating the door down with more ferocity than she needed to, but there was no real way to curb her unease. She needed to make sure that she was not somehow the only one in the hallway that could hear the bizarre noises.

 

The residents just had to at least have caught scent of it—to hear the whispering, to hear the scratching. They needed to be able to hear  _ something.  _ She couldn’t possibly be the only one because then she was—

 

The door abruptly opened, and Harrie almost fell into the woman just inches behind the door; Harrie’s balance gone at the sudden loss of a very solid barrier.

 

She shuffled for a second before righting herself, a blush coloring her cheeks at the sight of her landlady with her brow raised questioningly in response to her very lackluster entrance. Harrie felt like she was being judged extensively for her behavior. The woman’s beady eyes surveying her form with a tightness to her face that Harrie did not recall seeing when she’d almost toppled over. 

 

Harrie tried not to fidget beneath her scrutiny.

 

Harrie was dressed in an oversized T-shirt and a pair of gym shorts she’d borrowed from Ron several years prior. It was comfortable, the smooth feel of the fabric against her skin and the lightness of the material perfect for staying indoors. It was also the first thing she had seen when she had gotten up that morning, so that made it the perfect garment to wear. She was in her lion slippers again, feeling  no shame in flaunting them in the hallway in bright daylight now that she had already done so before.

 

She just didn’t have the energy to care anymore. Not after the night she’d had.

 

“Is there a reason you are beating down my door, Miss Potter?” The landlady began, her lips pressing into a thin line. The lady was pudgy and matronly—attired in a long, plain dress that made her look older than she actually was. It was a light pink color that flattered her soft caramel complexion, the fit of the dress fitting around her rather snugly. It wasn’t too horrendous of a garment, but the fact that it had been  _ her  _ wearing it made the thing offensive.

 

The lady was toad-like, her lips permanently set into a sneer that conveyed just how unpleasant she was. There wasn’t a dress in the world that could fix that deplorable personality. Harrie wasn’t one to dislike people immensely without knowing them that well, but Harrie had quickly come to terms with the fact that she couldn’t like everyone.

 

Some people were just deplorable, and that included her landlady.

 

“See, well. Have there been any complaints lately about strange noises at night?” Harrie shot out, wincing slightly at how paranoid and crazy the question sounded. She probably could have worded that a bit better—taken her time to truly arrange her thoughts to evoke a much more reasonably response from the tight lipped woman.

 

But Umbridge was not the easiest woman to deal with. She doubted she could have garnered a better response. The woman, for some bizarre reason, just didn’t like  _ Harrie _ . She didn’t know what she could have done to deserve such frostiness. Harrie was nothing short of polite—always steering clear from the woman when her patience was at its limit.

 

“No, Miss Potter. The only person that visits with any sort of complaints here is you,” Umbridge replied, her tone edging on hostile now.

 

Harrie frowned in response, her earlier fear overtaken by her sudden irritation.

 

_ This lady. _

 

“No one at all? No strange sounds? No strange doors opening by themselves? No whispering in the dead of night?” Harrie asked, incredibly angry now. At first, she wasn’t going to provide so much information on her predicament. Planning instead to give the woman some sort of peace of mind from the possibility of strange shite happening in her apartment complex—but fuck her.

 

If Umbridge was going to be difficult, then Harrie would return the favor three-fold.

 

“Are you implying that there are  _ ghosts  _ in my apartment?” Umbridge’s voice had dropped several degrees then, her forehead creasing so heavily that Harrie could probably arrange her knick-knacks over the folds.

 

“Not at all,  _ Umbridge _ . It just seems that you’re not…how do I put this?” Harrie tucked her hand underneath her chin mockingly, pretending to think critically on the Umbridge’s accusation. “That you’re not providing a quality service here. That you’re allowing  _ tenants  _ to disturb others. It would be a damn shame if I had to report you,” Harrie said sweetly, her lips parting into a devious smile when Umbridge paled considerably at that.

 

No one wanted to be reported. College students talked, and Harrie knew enough powerful people—thanks Sirius—to truly do some damage. She had never considered doing something like this before, but the idea of seeing this woman  _ squirm _ , well, it was certainly worth it.

 

“I-I,” Umbridge stuttered, before stopping to clear her throat.

 

“I’ll do everything I can to ensure that nothing strange is happening,” Umbridge finally stated, and Harrie grinned in genuine delight. Her teeth white and her verdant eyes dancing brightly beneath the fluorescent light.

 

“Glad to hear that. Nice doing business with you,” Harrie stated sarcastically, unable to stifle a laugh at the growl of annoyance that left the woman’s lips before giving her back to the woman. 

 

Harrie strutted down the hall with a skip to her step, laughing aloud when the woman slammed the door, the walls vibrating with the force with which she’d thrown it. The sound ricocheted around the sparse hallway and Harrie reveled at the sound.

 

_ That _ , Harrie thought,  _ had felt amazing. _

 

She didn’t stop smiling as she walked down the hall, noting the quizzical looks of those that walked past her as she moved. She didn’t know any of them, her firsthand knowledge of the residents limited considering her hermit-like habits. Harrie only went out with her friends, and made friends through and by them. She was private—completely unlike what her parents, and her friends, had thought she would be.

 

Harrie was a breath of fresh air after a long day. A comfort that could readily discern just when you needed a soothing voice. She wasn’t always reasonable, but she was gifted with an uncanny ability to pierce through to the marrow of one’s bones—to figure out one’s intentions without much to go on.

 

Some would call her paranoid—a running joke between herself and Ron. And it certainly wasn’t far from the truth. It was only ever Hermione that managed to curb her wild imagination, distracting her with things that she knew Harrie would be fascinated by.

 

It was a beautiful dynamic they all shared, and it was certainly a shame that all three were not together for the time being.

 

Harrie could certainly use Ron’s humor. His jokes and exaggerated reactions at even the smallest of things uplifting in its own way.

 

Her smile wavered when she finally stopped in front of her door. The door handle glinting silver beneath the lights; the promise of another day just behind the wood.

 

She inhaled deeply before releasing a hot breath from her protesting lungs, and slid her key in. She heard the tell-tale sound of the door unlocking; its click breaking the deathly silence that had fallen in the empty hallway, before twisting the knob and stepping inside.

 

The flat was just as she left it, but Harrie could not shake the feeling that there was still something strange going on.

 

She wasn’t quite a believer of the unknown, but she knew there were things that were unexplainable. Mysteries that many tried to explain away with science and logic, but fell short of completely answering. She had never felt the need to consider such things  _ until now _ , and it was both unexpected and unnerving. 

 

Her situation was shaky at best, and Harrie felt just as unstable.

 

Harrie locked the door behind her, and walked about the room. Her steps firm, and her shoulders squared defensively despite her instincts pleading for her to simply take her laptop and go.

 

Normally, she obeyed her gut feelings unthinkingly—trusting the voice to guide her in the proper direction because it had never failed her. But she was just as compelled to remain as she was to leave—knowing that if she started sleeping at Hermione’s flat that she’d never be able to accomplish her goal.

 

_ But the scratching, the voices, and the eyes... _ Harrie her mind viciously supplied. Her voice loud and uneasy even within her own mind.

 

_ But Voldemort _ ...Another voice supplied immediately in turn, its purr urging her to remain just where she was. 

 

Harrie couldn’t just stop when she’d come so far. She couldn’t just  _ leave _ .

 

She had already debated sitting at the noisy coffee shop down the street, but the thought of sitting around a crowd of people just didn’t sit well with her.. It was simply out of the question. It would be just as about as productive as sleeping over Hermione’s flat. 

 

_ And _ , Harrie thought,  _ why would she want to possibly share her research with others? _ It was vicious thought, one that didn’t sound at all like her. But she ate it up, knowing for a fact that it was certainly private.

 

People were simply too loud and distracting. Far too curious for their own good. Voldemort deserved more than passing concentration. She deserved Harrie’s undivided attention, and  _ only  _ her attention.

 

So with that thought, Harrie tossed her keys to the table and headed for her bedroom. Her footsteps almost inaudible as she slipped through her open doorway and sat down on her desk chair to boot up her laptop.

 

The screen flashed brilliantly to life and Harry smiled that the tabs were still, thankfully, there.

 

She clicked on YouTube and clicked on the first playlist she found for some music. The thought of sitting in silence about as unpleasant as speaking to Umbridge. She doubted she could handle another night with just her own mind, and so, when the melody of one of Chopin’s best began to filter through the silence, Harrie rose from her seat.

 

She was going to research Voldemort extensively today—

 

But first, she was in desperate need for a bath. She had not taken one the previous day when Hermione had kidnapped her and she had failed to take one once she’d returned hours after that.

 

She didn’t want to know what she smelled like then, and so, raised the volume on her laptop and headed toward the bathroom, grabbing a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt she had yet to put into its place after laundering them earlier in the week.

 

It smelled clean, and although it was a bit rumpled—she wasn’t going to be catwalking anywhere anytime soon.

 

Harrie slipped into the bathroom and dropped her things on the toilet seat, leaving for a moment to grab a towel from inside her closet before returning, and locking the door.

 

She really needed this.

 

A warm bath was certainly a great way to start the day.

 

Harrie undressed quickly, sliding off her glasses from her nose and dropping them on the bathroom counter, and stepped into the tub.

 

Her skin rippled with gooseflesh at dropping layers of warmth, but she paid it no mind as she turned the taps, watching as water burst from the nozzle. Making the water as hot as she could possibly bear—or as Ron so eloquently put, Satan’s arsehole hot—she then stepped inside

 

Once Harrie could see the steam rising from the water tickling her feet, she dropped the stopper on the mouth of the tub. The water would be nice and hot for a long time.

 

Just what she needed.

 

Harrie waited until the water was inches below her knees—the perfect height before—rummaging through the shower caddy for the bath bomb Hermione had gifted her on her birthday. It smelled like jasmine and vanilla—a combination Harrie did not think she would like at first. It had certainly grown on her now, and she doubted she could ever bathe with anything else.

 

It just sucked that it wasn’t cheap. She could have spent her whole life not knowing about this and living off cheap soap.

 

Hermione had ruined her.

 

She watched through bleary eyes as the water turned a soft green—several shades lighter than her own emerald eyes before dropping into the water once the color settled. The feeling was heavenly.

 

Harrie moaned blissfully from the warmth that spread through her limbs, the burn coloring her tan skin red as she settled further into the water, laying her head on the cold porcelain. She reached for the two-in-one shampoo and conditioner she kept right at the corner of the tub, pumping the velvety cream onto her fingers and massaging it into her scalp with her eyes firmly closed shut as she did.

 

If only she had a bottle of wine. Or a couple beers to accompany this treat. Harrie wished more than ever that she and Hermione had not drank the last few beers she had had in her fridge the week before. It certainly could have hit the spot right about now.

 

Harrie made a note to go to the market to purchase some more while she massaged her scalp, before dropping her hands into the water to wash away the suds from her fingers. It would definitely be nice to have something to drink just for mornings like this. Or even afternoons, if she was being honest.

Alcohol solved most troubles, and now that she was living on her own, she could definitely get away with things her mum normally wouldn’t allow for.

 

It was nice to no longer rely on Sirius for a drink, and at the thought of the scruffy looking man, she grinned, recalling the various times she and him had gone off for a pint without her mum’s knowledge. Her dad was far more lenient and permissive, being quite the mischievous man himself. _ I miss them. _

 

Harrie didn’t know how long she’d been laying in the tub—her skin soaking up the fragrances imbued in the water. But, gauging from how wrinkled the tips of her fingers were feeling, it had been quite long. The water was still rather hot, but it was tapering off until it was almost lukewarm. She had certainly reminisced in the bath for longer than she had thought.

 

It was almost time to get out, and Harrie felt unwilling to move.

 

Harry leant forward to rinse off the suds from her hair, the water rippling with her movement.

 

And froze. Her body tightening into a spring when she felt something sharp and very much like a finger tease from where her hairline began, and down her neck to press against each individual bump of her spine, before stopping where the water was at the center of her back. She was terrified, her blood running cold with her horror. 

 

She didn’t think.

 

She whipped around immediately, her vision blurred but not so terribly that she could not see the outline of a person. But there was no one there—no figure crouching down below to tease her skin. The absence both troubled and relieved her, and it was only after a few moments of surveying the bathroom, that she relaxed back into the water.

 

And then the touching began again, nails dragging unpleasantly across her skin.

 

Harrie, immediately shutting her eyes, felt like she might have a heart attack. The lax feeling of her muscles and the haze of relaxation that had settled over since laying in the bath, suddenly ripped away. She tried to ignore the scratching, knowing for a fact that there simply could not be anyone there—not when she had looked just seconds earlier—and chanted the words resolutely in her mind that this simply was not  _ happening.  _ It just couldn’t be real.

 

She had looked and there was no one there. She was  _ alone _ .

 

Her skin crawled when she felt the intrusive sensation of eyes boring into her back then, and Harrie wanted more than ever to cover herself up. To hide away and shield herself from the burning stare melting her from the inside out. It made her all too aware in that second that she was completely naked, and that thought alone made gooseflesh ripple across her skin—a horrifying reminder of just how vulnerable she was.

 

Harrie dunked her head underwater then, the burning need to rinse off the suds from her hair spurring her movements.

 

She tangled her fingers into her hair, working at her black hair so fast that Harrie was almost impressed she hadn’t torn any off in her haste to wash out all the lather. Satisfied that she’d removed all of the product from her hair, Harrie made to rise from the position she’d been lying in for the past hour.

 

_ Everything will be fine, just have to _ —

 

She never finished the thought.

 

Harrie cried out when when she felt something solid press onto the back of her head and shove her beneath the water. Bubbles rushed past her face from her open mouth, her eyes stinging from the soap getting into her wide, shocked eyes. She struggled against the force, her arms flailing and her legs kicking out uselessly when she failed to hit anything—the cruel pressure like claws digging into her sensitive scalp.

 

She tried to hold her breath, but the sudden shock of being pushed under forced what little air she had through her nose and mouth—the jasmine and vanilla bath bomb tasting bitter on her tongue as she tried not to drown. She couldn’t see anything from beneath the water, her vision compromised by the soap getting into her eyes, and her horrid sight.

 

Her eyes felt like they were on fire, but she refused to close them, too afraid of the darkness steadily creeping around her vision. It reminded her of the darkness she had traveled through in the museum before reaching Voldemort’s exhibit--of wading through black with fear sitting on her chest.

 

That experience had been awful, but  _ this _ , Harrie thought faintly, was infinitely worse.

 

Her lungs felt like they were going to explode from the absence of air. Her chest too tight, her throat burning like never before as she continued to struggle until her scattered movements began to weaken. Harrie felt darkness creep further around her eyes—her fear mounting to new heights when the pressure did not abate despite the weakening of her struggles, despite the bubbles escaping from her lips when she inhaled water.

 

_ I’m going to die. _ Harrie thought, horrified that she’d be another dead girl found in her tub. A vision of Hermione and Ron’s mourning faces making something constrict in her gut. What would they think happened? Would they think she’d killed herself? That some person had slipped into her flat, undetected and killed her? Would they even consider the possibility that some ghost had possibly attacked her? That some invisible a person had slipped through the darkness in her bathroom and—

 

The pressure left almost as quickly as it came. The touch was elusive and fleeting, gentle enough for Harrie to seize it like the lifeline that it was.

 

It gave her the opening she needed, and Harrie, desperately clinging to life, shot up from the water, her mouth wide as she gasped and sputtered for air; coughing out water that had forced its way down her esophagus. She looked around the bathroom as she breathed, ignoring the burning in her eyes and the ache in her throat as she tried to make out just then if she was truly alone. If the bathroom was truly as empty as it seemed.

 

Nothing. There was no one else in the room but her.

 

Nothing but her croaking breaths that broke the heavy silence that had fallen around her. The light from the small window and the light bulb above her head her only company as she considered, with numb and trembling fingers, what happened.

 

Harrie didn’t know how long she stayed in the bathroom, her body shaking from her too real encounter with death. But it was long enough for her to think on her predicament then. Her memories of her strange encounters forcing their way to the forefront of her mind now that she wasn’t so stupidly distracted with Voldemort’s allure.

 

Something strange was going on, and it was  _ dangerous _ . This wasn’t stress or her bloody imagination. This wasn’t some prank an arsehole neighbor was playing.

 

Someone— _ something _ —she corrected, was trying to kill her.

 

It was with that thought that Harrie decided she was leaving her flat. She could do her research at Hermione’s place, and if the girl so much as said a word about how obsessive she was being, well, Harrie had ammunition of her own to fling.

  
Hermione was definitely the last person to comment with how unhealthy  _ her  _ study habits were as it stood.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And we continue on with the tale.
> 
> Leave comments and kudos if you enjoy the work. They make me smile.

Showing up at Hermione’s flat unannounced had certainly not been the best idea.

 

The girl looked a fright dressed in paint-stained sweats and a tanktop. Her hair mussed and in such a state of disarray that Harrie wondered how she even managed to wash it at all. Harrie already had trouble with her own, and it wasn’t even  _ curly! _

 

Hermione had shot so many questions at her when she arrived with hair still wet and her laptop under her arm that Harrie was convinced she was living through the Spanish Inquisition in real time. It had definitely not been easy dealing with the literal torrent of questions flung her way by her motherly friend, but if Harrie was one thing, it was tenacious. She had been quick to answer Hermione’s questions, somewhat expecting this sort of behavior.

 

After years of friendship, Harrie knew ‘Mione like the back of her hand and employed that fact for her own benefit. Though that hadn’t been an easy skill to acquire, knowing for a fact that more often than not, Hermione was simply worried for her. It made her guilty having to lie to her—even by omission—but there were times that it had to be done.

 

For instance, now.

 

Harrie dodged the more aggressive ones by shooting one of her own, managing to easily derail Hermione’s bloodhound tendencies. It wasn’t an outright lie, but the guilt in her stomach when she did it certainly made it seem like it was.

 

It was a horrid place to be, to be forced to hide the true reason she was there, but it it needed to be done.

 

It was really a temporary fix. Harrie knew for a fact that the girl, although easily derailed, will eventually figure out that she’d never answered her questions completely. Harrie would have to come up with an actual concrete lie later on, and that prospect alone was more daunting than even suffering through Hermione’s verbal tongue lashing.

 

And that was saying something because Hermione’s lectures were  _ awful. _

 

Harrie would figure it out eventually, but for now, she’d simply take what she could get. A temporary fix to the problem was better than no fix at all, in her own humble opinion.

 

Following that spectacle, Harrie crashed on Hermione’s couch that morning, uncaring of the fact that it was only 11 a.m. Harrie placed her laptop on the floor since the girl had yet to get a coffee table of her own, and just dropped down for a few hours.

 

It was easily the best sleep Harrie had had in a long time. It was comforting knowing that whatever it was that was in her apartment could not follow her here—that Hermione’s own unique scent of honeysuckle and lavender was there to take the edge off the fear that had overtaken her.

 

It was sweet, uninterrupted sleep; and Harrie was more than grateful for the moment of respite. Her were thoughts were more manageable now that she wasn’t both terrified out of her mind and running on possibly two hours of sleep.  

 

It certainly didn’t hurt that she wasn’t going to be killed in her sleep here, too.

 

Harrie stretched her arms out and then rose from the couch, immediately scooping up her laptop, rushing past Hermione’s bedroom door, and headed toward the kitchen table pressed between the small kitchen and the front door.

 

Hermione was tending to something in the kitchen, and Harrie shot her friend a glance, taking in just how engrossed Hermione was with preparing breakfast, before opening her laptop and immediately jumping into research mode. Her fingers were typing so rapidly on the keyboard that it came as no surprise when Hermione cleared her throat at her to catch her attention. Her friend’s brow was raised questioningly, seemingly distracted by the sudden sound of a keyboard getting smashed.

 

_ Oops. _

 

Harrie shot the girl a sly smile before turning her attention back to the laptop and delving into the thread; her hand sliding through the mousepad with expert precision to flip through various tabs on her browser. She took note of the many tabs she had had left open earlier, a few of them sources she’d managed to find, and started with the shortest one. She didn’t mind a bit of reading to get what she needed, but she was most certainly not Hermione. Harrie would not do more than needed—she had goal and that was to learn all that she could about Voldemort, not about Egyptian culture and mythology.

 

It was fortunate that it had been easy getting those PDFs open on the browser. She definitely made a note to thank Ron’s brothers, Fred and George for introducing her to the life of torrenting. Piratebay really was a god send. 

 

Though, looking now at the 30 tabs, Harrie wondered if she had not gone overboard. Especially when she had to open a separate window so that she could still distinguish the separate tabs she had opened.

 

Just as she was going to delve into the reading, Harrie was suddenly snapped out of her research at the faint sound of glass pressing on glass; the sound distinct as it shattered the silence that had fallen in the room. She looked up almost immediately, drawn in by the noise, only to catch sight of a plate of bacon and eggs being placed at her side. She smiled nervously at Hermione’s glower, lifting the plate automatically and shoving aside her laptop to dig in.

Hermione’s expression had brooked no argument, and although Harrie could have fought her on this, she allowed it. Realizing just then, that she was actually starving.

 

Harrie plowed through her meal faster than even Ron could. Her jaw was moving so quickly that she almost laughed when Hermione made a disgusted noise, her disapproval so thick in the sound that it almost made Harrie choke on a thin slice of bacon, the urge to laugh almost too strong. Just imagining the girl’s expression was enough to make Harrie’s lips twist into a smile as she ate.

 

Once she finished, Harrie turned her attention back to her laptop, her finger scrolling down through the short passage she had clicked on earlier. She felt her lips break out into a pleased grin, a laugh vibrating from her throat.

 

Her prayers might finally have been answered.

 

After scrolling through nonsense for lord knows how long—downloading books and reading short passages for days on end—she finally found something worth noting, an article that mentioned a woman thought to be deeply associated with serpents.  A someone, Harrie could not help but think excitedly, that  _ could  _ be Voldemort.

 

The source wasn’t the most credible, however. The book itself outdated by several decades.

 

It was an innocuous little passage—one that she never would have paid mind to at all. But she was growing desperate and after seeing the users mention the book more than once in the thread, Harrie convinced herself to take the plunge.

 

And man, she regretted not doing it sooner.

 

The article was a short five-page piece about a powerful sorceress that could speak to snakes. Her power known throughout the land—drawing forth the attention of many elites and their subjects around.

 

She was said to be beautiful—an enchantress that could lure you in with a poisoned tongue and promises of power and success. A prominent figure in their society that demanded strict adherence to their faith. Her charisma and elegance as she spoke of the splendors of the afterlife should her demands be met, enough to draw forth women and men alike. She was no God, but she was certainly treated as one—people laid offerings at her feet. Though, from what little the article said, women were specifically sought after. The reason for this, however, was unclear and unmentioned.

 

Harrie devoured what little she could glean—noting with a vicious grin on her face how the article spoke of the Sorceress’s particular gift with serpents—the skill drawing forth the veneration of the Pharaoh himself. His delight so great that it was sufficient to bestow upon Voldemort a prominent position in his social circle. The decree, somehow, elevating Voldemort’s popularity from that of a powerful sorceress into a Goddess.

 

The Pharaoh’s most favored.

 

It certainly explained the beautiful murals painted onto the walls of her cavern, and the opulence of her relics. The different funerary masks and series of amulets hinting at the true generosity of the King with the Sorceress’s prowess and skill.

 

It was sad; however, that there was nothing more to glean from the text. There was no explanation as to why the woman had been punished in such a way that merited live mummification. The short passage in the book only spoke highly of the woman—emphasizing her particular skill with treating ailments and producing magic that left the minds of many numb with awe.

 

It made no bloody sense, and Harrie felt like she’d somehow been cheated. The absence of information feeling as though she’d been led down another bloody wild goose chase than to actual answers.

 

This passage created more questions than answers now that there was some hint to Voldemort’s identity. But could this be Voldemort? The passage made no mention of this title. The unique name absent and in its place, the true name of the sorceress.

 

What if this wasn’t Voldemort but someone else with a similar interest in snakes? It wasn’t unheard of at that time for Egyptians to revere serpents, grateful for their abilities in guarding their crops and weeding out rodents. Snakes were even known to be the protectors of the Pharaohs, Buto’s particular history alluding to the snake’s more than capable ability in doing just that.

 

But there was nothing more for her to read.

 

Harrie groaned aloud, pressing her fingers to her eyes as if to banish the irritation there, and typed the name into Google.

 

She doubted she’d find much, but she at least had to try.

 

_ Tem Pa-neck. _

 

She hit enter, her breath catching as she waited for her search results to pop into existence.

 

Harrie frowned deeply, scrolling down the first page and noting with growing irritation that nothing appeared.

 

All she found were clothing advertisements. 

 

She added “Egyptian” and “Names” to the search, in the hopes that it would yield her more fruitful avenues, but that didn’t yield much either. There were several interesting articles explaining the meaning of the names—the list rather short, but informative on the meaning and traditions of Egyptians with such things. But there was absolutely  _ nothing. _

 

And if that wasn’t enough, the book she had found did not even show up on the search! 

 

Harrie wanted to tear her hair from out of her skull, the sound of Hermione moving about the house ignored completely as she scrolled furiously, frustration fueling her search.

 

Well, if the name wasn’t going to get her anywhere,she should at least figure out what the damn thing meant.

 

It wasn’t difficult finding it on the page.

 

_ Queen of the Serpent. _

 

Well, that was certainly fitting considering her talent.

 

“Harrie.” The girl in question froze, her attention shooting to the stormy look on Hermione’s face. Hermione was frowning at her, a set to her jaw that Harrie knew for a fact meant trouble. She looked rather unhappy with something, and a Hermione that was unhappy was never a good thing.

 

What that something was, Harrie did not know. She’d have to tread lightly.

 

“You’ve been sitting at the kitchen table for five hours now.” Hermione stated and Harrie gaped, quickly looking away from Hermione to stare at the clock at the corner of her laptop.

 

_ Shite, she was right. _

 

She had been scrolling through and reading about Voldemort for hours now. Could time have really passed that quickly?

 

_ Lord. _

 

“I was hoping you’d tell me why you’re not staying at your place, considering the state you came in. I thought it best to wait until you were less distracted and well…that time never came.” Harrie swallowed, just recalling then that she had completely avoided answering most, if not all, of Hermione’s questions by deflecting them with some of her own.

 

Typically, the strategy worked. Hermione was always unable to resist the allure of being asked about her current studies and such. So easily goaded into answering her questions and losing herself to the explanation of how synapses worked in the brain when one consumed some bizarre drug. Neurology was her weak point, and Harrie took full advantage of that.

 

But it seemed Harrie’s luck had just run out. Hermione’s face was tense and her shoulders were squared in a manner that reminded Harrie faintly of the time Ron had nearly concussed himself while playing Football.

 

She needed to think of something quick.

 

Harrie scrambled for some sort of answer—thinking up millions of excuses she could use before settling on one that seemed most believable. It was close to the truth that just about anyone could believe it, and Harrie clutched onto it like a vice, prepared for the worst.

 

Now let’s see if this works.

 

“Remember how I mentioned that my air conditioning has been acting funny?” Harrie began, eyeing the way Hermione’s mouth parted in understanding, the unease in her caramel eyes melting away into a safer emotion; an emotion that made guilt churn unpleasantly in her gut.

 

_ Compassion. _

 

She hated that she had to lie, but feeling guilty would not make the situation better. She was doing this more for Hermione’s peace of mind than for hers, and so, she pushed through despite her reservations. It was fortunate—or unfortunate depending on how one looked at things—that Umbridge was such a shite landlady, she doubted she would have had an excuse to feed Hermione otherwise.

 

“Yeah, well. It’s finally broken and it is impossible to be in there with this heat. I already complained, but you know how Umbridge is,” Harrie finished, and Hermione nodded her head at her, her eyes bright with both anger and sympathy.

 

The look made Harrie all the more aware of the fact that she’d lied to her childhood friend of many years. She felt incredibly guilty for lying to her, but there was simply no other way. Knowing Hermione’s skepticism, she might end up breaking down her door and demanding to know just who was pranking her.

 

It certainly wasn’t unheard of for people to go to such lengths for people they hated. But there was really no way of explaining how she’d almost been drowned by a person that was not even there.

 

Hearing things was one thing, but feeling and experiencing was another.

 

“I’m sorry to hear that, Harrie. It certainly explains why you looked rather drenched when you came in,” Hermione continued, and Harrie relaxed further into her chair once Hermione turned away with a book and several sheets of paper in hand. Her relief was immediate, the power of Hermione’s inquisitive stare enough to make even grown men tense.

 

Harrie honestly didn’t know how Ron handled it. She supposed it had something to do with his massive crush, but that was beside the point.

 

Harrie watched Hermione as she slipped into her room, knowing for a fact that Hermione was going back to to her desk in her bedroom to study. It was what the girl often did when Harrie would come over and crash at her place when she didn’t want to pay for a cab, and it was definitely not  stretch to think that she’d do that with Harrie there now. 

 

“I’ll be in my room if you need me. I have to revise for an exam coming two weeks from now,” Hermione called out before kicking the door closed behind her; the sound of the lock clicking into place breaking the silence that had fallen over them.

 

Harrie was just about to get back into her reading, twisting around in her chair to regard her laptop for closely, when Hermione opened the door once more—the sound disrupting the short silence that had fallen.

 

“Oh, and don’t forget to  _ sleep _ . You look horrid, and as lovely as coffee is, you need some rest. Dozing off on my couch in the daytime isn’t good for—“

 

“Yes, mum,” Harrie interrupted, grinning from ear to ear when Hermione huffed before slipping back into her room to leave Harrie to her research.

 

_ Thank god. _


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And again, and again.
> 
> Please leave comments or kudos. I appreciate them.

After several days of holing up in Hermione's apartment, Harrie decided that enough was enough.

 

She couldn’t hide away forever. All of her mail was coming into her flat and she was paying for rent. Harrie needed to return at some point, and although it was nice to crash at her friend’s place for a couple days, she did need to go back.

 

Though, she didn’t have to like it.

 

This was the responsible thing to do. A dumb thing, admittedly, but it was the  _ brave _ thing to do. And it was mostly the latter that had her packing her things and readying herself for the battle that was looming over her head, but she just couldn’t stomach the fact that she’d run with her tail tucked between her legs like some frightened pup—the notion of allowing whatever it was to  _ win _ , well.

 

It wasn’t sitting right with her.

 

After mulling over her predicament for the past few days—she convinced herself that her best bet was to simply return and see if things had somehow calmed down. If—and she sincerely hoped this was the case—the entity had dissipated with her absence.

 

Harrie was the first to admit that she did not know a single thing about ghosts and spirits. But she was sure she had read something somewhere implying that they fed off the energy of the inhabitants in the house. The language of the article she’d gone through had been a bit vague, but it was sufficiently informative to arm her with the proper tools.

 

Or at least she hoped so.

 

She held a bible on hand and had stuffed some holy water in her bag just as a precaution. A couple of things she’d picked up and hidden away when Hermione had not been looking—feeling more than grateful that Hermione had dragged her out to the shops the day before.

 

It didn’t make her feel any more protected, however. It failed to truly curb her nausea and unease as she rode the taxi back to her flat—the sun hanging above the horizon indicating just how late in the afternoon it already was.

 

Admittedly, Harrie should have left a few hours earlier. Just to get a nice head start in the morning and get a feel for how her apartment was—but between her research and Hermione’s presence, she barely managed to rip herself out of the flat. Her hunger for more stoked by the little sliver of information she managed to find.

 

It certainly didn’t help that more news articles surfaced announcing that another researcher involved with the Voldemort exhibit had died.

 

Another tragic incident that took not only the life of the researcher, but of her husband and two children as well. It was freakish—unexpected that such a thing could happen to a family that, Harrie recalled then, was described as incredibly loving and secure. The woman had run over both her husband and children with her SUV, crushing them easily beneath the vehicle,  before slitting her own throat in grief with a knife she’d taken from the house. She’d bled out on the front seat of her car while her husband breathed his last breaths.

 

Her children had mercifully died on impact. But Harrie knew that it would be little comfort to the friends and family that had known them.

 

Harrie didn’t know how the people on the forum had found the more inflammatory information, unveiling pictures and details that the article had mercifully left out, but she certainly wasn’t going to ask. She already had enough on her plate as it was.

 

_ Another set of mysterious deaths... _

 

Harrie shoved all thought of that dreadful event aside, noting with displeasure that instead of distracting herself from what awaited her at her flat, all thought of the tragedy simply made her antsier. It was uncomfortably too similar to what she had experienced in her home flat,the memory of her mouth choking on water heavy on her mind.

 

_ A hidden figure that nearly drowned me... _

 

When the car stopped in front of her complex, Harrie paid the driver and stepped out. Her stomach was fluttering unpleasantly as she stepped into the lobby, quickly moving past the front desk toward the elevators with dread churning in her belly. She knew what she needed to do, but that didn’t stop her from feeling uncomfortable with that she was going to do.

 

Once she’d reached the elevators, Harrie pressed her fingers almost instinctively against the button, ignoring the discomfort weighing heavily on her mind.

 

The wait for the elevator was agonizing, but she was soon shuffling inside and moving steadily closer to her flat.

 

She lived in the flat furthest from the elevator—a conscious decision she had made when moving in. Moving day tended to be the worst, the noise from furniture being brought in and the loud jeering of freshly graduated high school students enough to melt through the walls. Harrie had wanted to stay away from all that insanity, knowing well that when her schooling began that she would need all the quiet she could get.

 

She was now dreading that decision. Being near the elevators meant someone could at least hear something should she call out for help.

 

Harrie only had herself to rely on.

 

She walked out of the elevator once it opened, and past the many doors at either side of the hall. Each step taken was a death sentence, she noted as she walked down the hall to her door, her heart beating uncomfortably fast. It was eerily empty; no soul to be found—her sodding neighbors that usually milled about around this hour, nowhere to be found. She couldn’t curb the dread that whispered in the back of her mind then, the desire to turn back strong despite her pride shouting for her to keep going.

 

The hall was silent save her for muffled steps as she closed the distance between herself and her apartment door. The time taken to arrive too short for her liking, but Harrie plowed through until she was standing just inches in front of her door. And then Harrie paused, considering for a moment if she should really do this; a voice of reason urging her to go, while another, more salient voice, coaxed her to remain. It sounded suspiciously snake-like.

 

_ Sod it. _

 

Harrie forced her key into the lock with more force than was required, her fingers tense and shaky once she heard the tell-tale sound of the door unlocking, her anxiety twisting her stomach into knots. Releasing a shaky breath, Harrie turned the key, forcing her stiff arm to push the door, and pushed the door open.

 

The first thing she noted was cold air. Its wintery breath pressing against her face as she mulled over just why this was.

 

_ Had Umbridge finally fixed the bloody thing? _ Harry wondered, her skin breaking out into goosebumps from the sharp bite of cold air.

 

Seconds passed before Harrie finally decided to move.

 

She stepped further into her flat and shut the door behind her with her foot, eyeing the mess that was still on her kitchen table and the undisturbed veneer of her living room.

 

It looked just as it always did, but Harrie didn’t trust it. The strange bullshite could start any second now, and knowing her luck, whatever that thing was might actually succeed in killing her. The attempt at her life could steadily morph into an actual murder if she wasn’t careful, after all, and she’d be an idiot if she made that easy. Though, putting up a fight was certainly difficult when you couldn’t bloody see your enemy. 

And then this peace. She couldn’t help that she felt wary of it; the possibilities of why the room was this way, making her breathing shallow and labored. It was uncomfortable and terrifying, and Harrie would not pretend she wasn’t afraid of what could be lurking in the shadows. 

 

Harrie could never forget the feeling of nearly drowning in her bathtub. An experience Harrie vowed she’d never let herself face again. 

 

She stood by the front door for what felt like an eternity before Harrie finally convinced herself to move—throwing herself on the loveseat, rather than her couch this time, with her laptop and bag of clothes still in her arms.

 

So far so good.

 

And then she waited.

 

And  _ waited. _

 

Anticipation thrumming beneath her skin, expecting at any moment for the specter to come around and strangle her—expecting  the strange being to whisper threats into her ear, just as it often did in the late hours of the evening. Her hands felt clammy with sweat, her brow damp despite the chill in the air—but Harrie ignored it all as she held her breath with her teeth on edge.

 

She expected at any moment for her arms to break out in gooseflesh from the familiar sensation of eyes boring into the back of her head.

 

But the sensation never came.

 

The silence was deafening as she surveyed the room with pinched brows and tight lips. Her heart beating wildly as she surveyed the room for any sign of a disturbance.

 

After several minutes, Harrie slumped in her seat, a relieved smile curving around her lips.

 

It was calm.

 

And that was more than Harrie expected. Better than she’d hoped.

 

She wouldn’t let herself be lulled into thinking it was safe yet, however. Fully expecting for the spirit to strike once Harrie was comfortable.

 

But for now, she’d consider this a win.

 

Even if she still felt like a lamb going into a slaughterhouse.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another chapter because the last one was short.
> 
> We are almost at the end, buckle your seat belts.

Several weeks passed and her flat was quiet. Not a hint of strange activity since she’d returned from Hermione’s place.

 

Harrie was ecstatic. 

 

The strange phenomenon had died completely. The days of terror biting at her heels as she moved around the flat, an old memory. She slept easier now, the first couple days of unease slowly unwinding until Harrie no longer recalled the visceral fear that had overtaken her. 

 

She felt at peace, and it was all that she could ask for. 

 

It was a markedly better situation than what she had been thrown under several weeks before. She no longer worried about a strange specter coming to strangle her as she bathed, or felt burning terror whenever she went to bed, waiting for the whispers to threaten her as she tried to rest. All of that was notably absent, and Harrie, was eager to return to the normalcy she had had before the entire nonsense had begun.

 

The days had gone by slowly, but the more she relaxed, surer now that no monsters were coming to murder her in her sleep, the days began to fall into one another. Time moved rapidly, stopping for no one as she dedicated hours of her time on Voldemort. Her mind, now, fully capable of focusing on research and the comforting lull of reading rather than the what ifs that had danced in her brain several days earlier.

 

It was heavenly.

 

And then sleep. Harrie’s relationship with sleep had certainly improved.

 

It was more than sufficient reason to perk up her mood, even though things hadn’t been looking too good with Voldemort so far.

 

Her progress with Voldemort had been slow—not particularly lucrative since she’d found the passage several days before—but it didn’t matter that she hadn’t made too much progress. There was a comfort in simply sitting down at her desk while sipping a cup of tea—and that was all she desired, really. There was just something incredibly satisfying about digging deeply through the internet, eager for a new source to pop up with information, or for another notification to show up on her browser alerting her that someone involved in the Voldemort project had published something. 

 

Things were slow, but Harrie could see the silver lining.

 

For one, searching through the forums had made Harrie particularly good at spotting when a poster was bullshiting her, and it was satisfying to know that she could hold her own now, rather than be taken down a ton of different rabbit holes to reach her goal. 

 

She had gotten smarter about her tabs as well—simply exiting out of those she knew for a fact were useless.

 

It wasn’t much, but sometimes it was all in the little things.

 

Though, there were still a couple books she needed to use Control F to get a handle on—as lovely as it was to read through Ancient Egyptian culture, she’d rather narrow her search to books that contained exactly what she was looking for. These books were massive in length, spanning to almost 900 pages discussing Egyptian culture and the root of their religious faith.

 

But Harrie needed something a little bit more specific than an explanation of religious symbols; she needed a concrete person to go off on. She needed a figure to pinpoint and look into—someone that could possibly be  _ real _ , and not some religious figure.

 

She had already found Tem, and that was as good as it was going to get.

 

But still, Harrie persisted, hopeful that she’d uncover something.

 

She widened her search to stories of snake-speaking women of all social castes rather than maintaining a much narrower search with only figures of power in mind. Considering then that perhaps Voldemort had not been powerful in the beginning, growing steadily into her prestige long after her reintroduction into Egyptian society. A powerful figure at some point, but surely, not always one. This move had made Harrie’s search more daunting, but she needed to find  _ something. _ Anything that could tie in a historical figure to the mysterious mummy sealed away in the museum; recalling vividly in the back of her mind how Voldemort’s serpentine visage looked twisted into a grimace of utmost displeasure.

 

Harrie jumped when her phone went off, the lion roar alert interrupting the soft piano solo she’d been listening to on her cellphone.

 

Harrie reached for her phone automatically, her eyes still glued to the computer screen before flicking her gaze down and pausing.

 

London CTVE news published an article on Voldemort.

 

Harrie didn’t think before clicking on the notification, waiting for the text to load with growing anticipation.

 

_ “Mummy Stolen from British Museum.” _

 

Harrie read aloud, unable to comprehend just what she was reading as she scrolled through the article, her finger pressing so hard on the screen that the digit had gone a pale white, several shades lighter than her creamy tan skin.

 

Someone had stolen the body. The corpse literally vanished like a magician from the set of magic show.

 

There was zero information to be gleaned from the article, the time stamp indicating that the body had allegedly gone missing several hours before, at approximately 7 p.m. when the guards were switching shifts.The guards had been going through their rounds, the museum closing up for the night, when they had looked over at Voldemort’s sarcophagus and noticed that she was gone. They had scrambled for some sort of explanation; the interview conducted by the reporter shedding little light on the matter.

 

“ _ The body was there one moment. I remember it being there just before we left to check the other room. And then it was just gone!” _

 

Harrie was deeply disturbed by the revelation, a frown shaping around her lips. Who could possibly think to steal Voldemort? She was an enigma—a powerful being and likely a sorceress from what Harrie had gathered in her research. But that was definitely no reason to steal a dried out corpse. Especially to where it likely could not be properly preserved; there were many fundamental reasons mummies were specifically tucked away behind reinforced glass.

 

At a museum, the body would remain perfectly intact and would suffer no more damage than it had already when extracted from its tomb. Without the careful scrutiny of the staff, anything could happen to the mummy.

 

_ No. _

 

Harrie was assaulted by feelings of both distress and anger at the thought, tossing her phone to the bed with more strength than needed and swiveling around in her chair to look back to her laptop.

 

She felt tears gather at the corners of her eyes—uncaring of the fact that she was being ridiculous about the whole thing.

 

And confused. Because surely, she couldn’t possibly be this upset over Voldemort.

 

She was  _ just  _ a mummy. She wasn’t a real person. Well, she  _ had  _ been, but she wasn’t even bloody alive. There was no life to her powerful limbs—no color to her cheeks or gloss in her dried out eyes. She was a desiccated body.

 

Harrie may not be the most rational, launching herself head first into things without thought of the consequences, but never in her life had she ever cried because of something this...bizarre.

 

Her chest ached, a strange pressure pushing between her ribs as she thought of the possible damage that Voldemort could suffer. Harrie had dedicated blood, sweat, and tears in trying to uncover something about this woman.

 

And now, there was no body for her to look to. Voldemort’s relics and murals painted on the walls of the exhibit paled considerably to the woman herself.

 

She was a powerful sorceress—a source of power and guidance for those that sought out her services. She was in the Pharaoh’s bloody social circle—clearly favored most among the rest of his advisors, if allowed such an honor.

 

Voldemort didn’t deserve this.

 

Harrie felt tears trickle down her cheeks and quickly wiped them away before forcing herself to read.

 

She would find out about Voldemort.

 

Even if it killed her. In her  _ honor. _

 

It wouldn’t get her body back, but at least she’d feel less guilty that she hadn’t been able to see the body after finally uncovering the truth.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The chapter is here, and is almost more words than chapters 1-9 combined. I don't know whether to apologize or laugh at this.
> 
> I hope you all enjoy.
> 
> Please mind the tags, things are going to get dark here and will be quite graphic.
> 
> Please leave comments and kudos. This has been quite the ride.

Harrie thought she was going to scream.

She was shaking so badly that it was a surprise in and of itself that her papers hadn’t flown off her desk—her laptop’s screen trembling along with her as she stared at her laptop with growing excitement. Her heart felt like it was going to crawl up her throat, but she paid it little mind. Not when she could hardly breathe through the burst of endorphins pumping through her veins.

She had finally found the link. The information had practically fallen onto her lap when some blessed being had shared an obscure link on the server. It was a bloody miracle.

Normally, she’d never just clicked on random things without at least a text post explaining what the link even was. A precaution for both the safety of her laptop and for her own peace of mind.

She didn’t need to be linked to random porn sites, having already fallen prey to that several times already as she searched. Just _who_ had the time to be linking lesbian porn on an Egyptology forum?

_Honestly._

However, something had compelled her to do so this time despite her many reservations. A voice in the back of her mind urging her to press on the link, and Harrie, unable to resist the impulse, like a fly drawn in by an electrical trap, clicked and watched as the PDF opened on her screen.

A PDF that was clearly the answer to all her prayers.

The name Voldemort had not been mentioned at all in the document. Lady Tem’s name, also, notably absent from the text. But Harrie didn’t need either of those names, not when she had solid proof that this article pertained to the mummy in question.

The text was entitled “The Queen of Serpents” and just beneath the big, bold letters, was the image of Voldemort lying in her sarcophagus. Except there were details in this picture that Harrie did not recall seeing—the deviations evoking a tight feeling of rapture and awe as she took in Voldemort’s image.

Harrie could see that Voldemort was dressed exactly as Harrie had seen her in the exhibit, her thin but toned body wrapped in a beautiful sheath dress that fit seamlessly around her form. Harrie wondered idly if Egyptian women were even allowed to dress in that manner—if their dresses were supposed to be so tightly pressed against their skin, but she immediately shoved that intrusive thought aside—noting that it was more likely that she’d been mummified before and that this dress, or the remnants of it, was what laid against her skin.

Her face was just as displeased, but Harrie could see an array of relics pressed tightly to her sides in sarcophagus. Jewels, amulets, scepters, and, Harrie squinted, a locket propped right at the center of her chest, her fingers interlocked around the chain. She looked breathtaking, and Harrie was drawn in by her allure.

It was difficult to look away, but Harrie, almost regretfully, forced her eyes away, knowing that there was much more in the PDF for her to read.

And then, just below the image of Voldemort lying in her sarcophagus, there was that etching Harrie had stared at with incredible fascination at the museum almost two months earlier.

It was the same picture Harrie had seen at the museum, the dark robe flowing outward as if reaching out beyond the stone it was carved into. The snake was wrapped around a tall, thin body, twisting around the figure like a fitted glove. Harry could see the different patterns of the snake’s skin, its coils wrapped around its master in an almost loving embrace as the figure reached out towards something that was not in the small snippet Harrie could see.

It was almost identical except that instead of the hood cloaking the person in darkness, the hood was removed to reveal features that resembled Voldemort’s own. A face that Harrie knew was burned into her brain.

Harrie could hardly breathe.

There was no doubt that this was Voldemort.

Harrie knew she was in the right place, and with eager hands, wrapped her fingers around her mug and took a sip. The tea was bitter and cold on her tongue, the molasses-like consistency drawing a repulsed shudder from her.

 _This takes like shite_ , she thought with a frown, before setting the cup down, fixing her attention back to her computer.

She scrolled down to where the text began, anticipation heavy in her gut, and began to read. The script of the document was somewhat difficult to understand; the looping calligraphy of the author’s penmanship cumbersome as she tried to make sense of what the man had even written. It took her longer than she liked to make sense of it, but Harrie was of the stubborn sort.

She plowed through regardless of the difficulty, nearly pressing her face into the screen as she tried to decipher the person’s writing, but she paid no mind to the strain in her eyes. She needed to understand this person’s script. She will not be defeated by shitty scrawl.

And then, the words clicked. Like the flip of switch, the words became sensible and the story began to unfold before her riveted eyes.

Voldemort, or as she was called in the text, the Queen of Serpents was as revered as she was feared.

She was a powerful sorceress, a woman said to have blood ties with an ancient line of Pharaohs that had ruled over Egypt for several decades, their influence going back as far as the Early Kingdom. There was little mention of the long line in the text, but from what little Harrie could gather, they had been quite powerful and ruthless—their military leaving little room for free thought and expression. It had not been a pleasant period in Egyptian history, but even still, the Pharaohs were respected as much as they were abhorred.

Until they all died, that is. The text did not explain the tragic history of their untimely deaths. But Harrie did not need the book to be explicit, she was astute enough to read between the lines.

They’d been murdered; erased completely from the map. Leaving only, Harrie noted, the Queen of Serpents as the last in the long line. An heir that would never see the throne.

After the massacre, Voldemort, only a child then, was hidden away in the home of commoners. Their hearts too soft and their minds too kind to allow the beautiful girl to suffer through the atrocities that her family had been subjected to.

It was treasonous what the couple had done, but they were kind people. People that believed in the good of others, and so, they kept the young Queen away from the keen eyes of the aristocracy until they were sure that Voldemort could live in peace. Convinced even, that the villagers would not speak a word about the beautiful girl with pale skin.

Several years passed, and then a new King took the throne. The memory of the Slyytheekin line forgotten; swept away by the sands of time. Or at least, seemingly so.

Voldemort had only been a child then—beautiful and cherubic, as the text explained, but nowhere near powerful. She was still a child, and Harrie furrowed her brow at this. A child orphaned by both the cruelty of her own line and the vengefulness of others.

There were no means for the child to come to power under these circumstances. Her latent talent tucked away between her ribs, without the proper guidance of her powerful family. She was alone, and with that loneliness, came great consequences. There was no telling just what would befall her now, her life twisted and bent until it was unrecognizable. Harrie paused then, unsure.

There was a burning question in the back of mind, something that itched and writhed beneath her skin.

_Power._

_Just that did that mean?_ Harrie wondered, shock thick in her gut as she tried to make sense of the new information uncovered. Harrie had been right then, the girl had definitely not started off powerful. She may have been born to a long line of Pharaohs, but what did it matter if your entire line was nearly exterminated before you could see your potential grow? Before you could see your own talents unearthed? Before you could uncover your prowess for sorcery?

It was sad—inordinately cruel. Voldemort had only been a little girl. She was too young to go through something like this. It made Harrie angry on her behalf; betrayed even. With emotions churning, Harrie took a deep breath, temporarily squashing her indignation, before diving back into the passage. Things had been grim then, but they hadn’t been for long. Voldemort had become a powerful sorceress, recognized by a Pharaoh and elevated to a position of great respect.

_This wasn’t the end._

In the time that the new King had taken over the country, the girl disappeared from the village—her presence just as elusive as her title. Voldemort simply vanished from off the face of the Earth for a near decade before resurfacing again as a prepubescent child. Her radiance and pale skin drawing forth the unwanted attention of those that still remembered the old line that had been smited not too long ago. The couple that had cared for her, gone.

So it came as no surprise to Harrie that the villagers quickly turned her over to the Pharaoh, calling in the guards to take her away—revealing the true nature of her bloodline to all that were willing to listen.

The girl had not fought them—she willingly submitted herself to her fate as she was dragged through the crowded streets and forced onto her knees before the current king. A man that the girl could not have recognized, having disappeared for so long from the place she had perhaps, once, considered home.

The newest Pharaoh could not be considered a good man. He was cruel, almost as ruthless as the Slyytheekin kings had been, if not worse. All expected for the King to kill her—for the man to order his guards to behead her in the middle of his lavish home. But the killing blow never came, her bloodline and possible value, a threat, but not enough of one to force the man’s hand.

Instead of death, as the girl had expected then, as Harrie herself expected as she read, the man had cast her aside. He had banished her to the edges of the village to live with vermin. The man was certainly not intimidated by a mere slip of a girl, but he was sufficiently threatened by what her blood could mean. More frightened of the prospect of the girl stealing his riches than of the possibility of being overthrown.

And so he banished her, waving her away as if she were beneath both his time and consideration.

The King may not have killed her, but Harrie soon learned that there could be worse fates than death.

Voldemort was forced into the streets—no villager allowed to aid as she spent sleepless nights circling through the outskirts of the village wasting away. The guards would kick and beat her—the children would throw stones at her and mock her. Death would have been a mercy compared to this.

It stoked something deep in the girl—something powerful and volatile. A rage that resembled a coming storm, similar in appearance to the depictions of Ra’s chaotic battles with Apep, his greatest enemy.

And then, after many days of this constant abuse, as the sun descended after another round of beatings and humiliation, the girl vanished once again. The only memory that she had ever been there at all, the blood stained ground and the mud caked sheath dress she had worn.

Harrie wanted to be sick as she read through it. Her eyes helplessly drawn in, unable to look away from the detailed depiction of the torture the girl had faced. It was inhumane, and Harrie wanted nothing more than to protect the young Voldemort. To hide her away, to take her beneath her arm and save her from this cruelty Voldemort had faced. It was too much, but Harrie forced herself to read on. Assuring herself that this was not the permanent state of things. Voldemort had become powerful—had unlocked the power her own line had gifted her.

The Voldemort Harrie had seen beneath the casket had not seemed fragile, and Harrie seized onto this fact before turning her attention back to the text.

Several years passed before the Voldemort finally returned. Her presence melting into the shadows beneath the buildings of the village, unknown and unseen until she saw fit to ultimately reveal herself.

And when that day came, Voldemort unmasking herself for all the villagers to see, Voldemort was a woman; long since shedding her girlhood. Their watching eyes unable to recognize her; her immense stature and beauty making her unattributable to the fallen Queen they had so cruelly cast aside. She was a brand new woman, and everyone wanted to know her.

Her robes were sheer, unlike the appropriate attire of the noblewomen in Egypt. But that in no way detracted from her allure. In fact, the material was so valuable and precious that it shimmered brightly, catching on to the light of the rising sun. There were precious jewels and gems sewn into the silk, and Voldemort practically _glowed_. She was regal; an elegant woman that spoke of both power and poise.

And it was not solely Voldemort’s elegance that drew baited breaths from all that looked upon her.

The woman was supremely beautiful—shedding the innocence of the old and carrying now, the confidence of a woman that had seen too much and experienced the true splendors of existence. She was, at first, believed to be a healer. A woman that they spoke fondly of—her charismatic smiles and glittering dark eyes emphasizing just how different she was. None of the villagers able to recognize that this was the old Queen they had beaten and bruised, the girl they had banished to the dirty echelons of their cities. They opened their arms to her, an acceptance that Voldemort had never received as an innocent girl.

An acceptance that made Harrie feel bitter. It was capricious and hair raising how the villagers could so easily cast aside their cruelty only when it benefited them. There was no kindness to be found for Voldemort except for the couple that had whisked her away from imminent death, and to see it now, when Voldemort could work her magic for their people, it made something sour in Harrie’s mouth.

 _They should have been just as accommodating to Voldemort when she was a child_ , Harrie thought angrily. It took her a moment to gather her composure through her rage, but she did, albeit reluctantly, to read on further.

They came to Voldemort with their ill and their wounded, and Voldemort, healed them. She worked miracles that no religious scribe could do himself. Her magic unmatched, and her charisma just as potent as more and more came to seek her guidance. She was darkness unveiled, her pale skin contrasting with the dark colors of her dresses as she worked miracles through the village.

And then, many months since returning to Egypt, she revealed that she could speak to snakes. Her tongue curling and her lips tight as she called forth hoards of the reptiles to protect the village crops from the wave of rodents that had moved in from the east.

The villagers, and even the guards of the King, had begun to associate her with Renenutet and Buto. The powerful deities that guarded the harvest and the King with their unparalleled power, evoking both respect and awe for the young sorceress. Voldemort was practically a god, her beauty and her dark, glittering eyes a testament to this.

Her miracles ushered Egypt into an age of prosperity that none had seen before. The Nile River more resplendent, the crops greener and larger—it was a time that brought the spotlight onto the beautiful sorceress.

It had taken little time for the King, the one that had rejected her so cruelly long since dead, to come to her at last. But this boy was nothing like his Uncle—his eyes kind and his smile honest. Trusting. He knew nothing of the cruelty of the villagers toward the unknown Queen, knew nothing of the extinguished Pharaoh line that Voldemort belonged to. He was a king, but still a boy. And he welcomed Voldemort into his social circles with open arms, reserving for her a temple for which any and all could come forth to lay their offerings in her name. A show of gratitude for the miracles that she had worked and had promised to perform.

But his gratitude did not stop there.

She was painted onto the murals beside the different deities they worshiped. Beside Osiris and Isis—a strong barrier between Osiris and Set, his cruel brother; proof that Voldemort’s power was sufficient to curb even Set’s hatred for his brother. It was the greatest show of respect and a sentiment that all embraced with little, if any, reluctance.

Harrie was gaping as she read, disbelief coloring her cheeks pink. If Voldemort had played such a heavy role in that society then how did she vanish so suddenly? What had made her so unloved that the people agreed to remove her from existence, never to be remembered? Her body placed in a casket with locks pressed on the outside and words of warning written at its side?

The woman had been buried alive. Just what heinous crime could have led to this punishment?

 _Could her bloodline have led to such a fate?_ Harrie wondered then, chewing at her bottom lip thoughtfully. But no one remembered who she was, who she would have been. It didn’t make any sense to her at all.

Harrie needed to know. She needed to piece together this mystery now as it unfolded. And so, Harrie plunged herself back into the text, her heart sputtering as more of Voldemort’s life became revealed.

Harrie’s mouth dried out, and her hand froze over the mousepad, trying to digest what she read. Because surely this could not be the same woman that had ushered Egypt into its Golden Era? The cause of such growth in both its political and military might?

After several years, Voldemort ascended into power—her temple the most visited across the land. Women came from all over Egypt to see her, the promises of her miracles drawing them in like flies to honey. The whispers of her magic spreading further beyond Egypt and calling the attention of fair ladies from different cultures to Egypt's lands.

And she accepted them all into her arms, taking all that they had to offer before sending them off happier than they’d ever been.

It was simple—Voldemort’s magic and presence a heady addiction for even the most important of figures.

Harrie could not blame them for not suspecting Voldemort would turn on them, her good deeds and repertoire with many prominent members the text failed to name, blinding them to her true intentions. All that had visited—the men, the women, and the children returned to her temple bearing the mark of her work. Her magic suffusing through their veins, her influence in their gaze as they turned on the guards that had yet to give in to her cause.

Their deaths were only the beginning of a reign of terror.

The worthy were sacrificed right at Voldemort's feet, the men that resisted laid out and their blood drained to bolster her influence and to seal the fates of those that had already fallen. And the unworthy, well, they were not even worth placing into her potions. Voldemort instead gave them away as gifts or fed them to the massive serpent she had kept hidden for years beneath her temple.

The beast claimed the lives of Egyptians and Greeks that strayed out in the evenings long before Voldemort had turned on the Pharaoh and his advisers. It was a mystery that few knew of, but now, as Harrie read through it with dawning horror, it made all the sense that the people that disappeared would go missing.

They were people that possibly remembered Voldemort’s old identity. People that Voldemort herself had recognized and saw fit to remove swiftly before she began to ascend.

It was clever and callous. Harrie had not expected this at all from the young Queen. Harrie could in some sense understand that a woman betrayed, left to fend for herself after her society had rejected her, would feel bitter. But Harrie herself could never think to harm others—people that had not even been there when Voldemort was beaten and hurt.

But still, Harrie read on, despite the tight feeling in her throat.

The royal families were in shambles—terrified and awed by the power of the Queen of Serpents. They were afraid to lay their heads on their bed, to close their eyes and find the red of her irises lurking in their dreams—the familiar black that they had all been so besotted by, bleeding away into the color of their demise. Many of them fled from Egypt, chased along the Nile River as they did. Some killed en route to Greece and other neighboring countries, and those that were unfortunate to be captured, held within Voldemort's temple until she finally saw fit to dispose of them.

Death was more merciful than the lives they lived under her reign.

It was a savage year of blood running through the streets and men crying out for mercy, the resistance finally fell; the King, the only one that remained.

The King had refused to leave—choosing instead to fight with the few that had not yet turned over to Voldemort’s poisonous influence. Hiding in the shadows, planning various coup d'etats in order to break through Voldemort's strong defenses.

The battle had been arduous and long—Voldemort’s success sealed when the last remaining guard and the few villagers she had not been able to persuade, fell to her influence. They were clever in their many assassination attempts—nearly taking out Voldemort's key members in her circle, but Voldemort had been prepared for them.

It was almost as if she could predict what the rebels were going to do before the plans were ever acted upon. It was the turning point in the war, and it came as no surprise when Voldemort seized complete control of Egypt; the insurgents crushed.

Upon the King’s capture, he had been tortured for several days before Voldemort, seemingly bored with the games, finally presented him for a public execution. The man had been beaten before arrival, and almost as if to prove a point, tortured once more in the presence of all of Egypt. The King had been elevated on a high platform made of durable, black rock found deep within the ground. It had taken weeks for the slaves to build the appropriate stage for the show, but it was finally done. The performance ready to be unveiled before all.

And it was on that stage that the King was beaten and burned. The world watching with baited breath as he was whipped raw, the cries and the jeers of women in the crowd chanting for more blood. It was barbaric and crude—similar to the same savage delights the villagers and the guards themselves had taken when Voldemort had been beaten as a child; forced to face the humiliating laughter and cruelty of all that knew of her punishment.

Harrie felt sick to her stomach as she read, seeing the scene unfold almost like a movie behind the back of her eyes.

There was not a single man standing in the crowd—and that was perhaps the most devastating point in the text in Harrie's opinion. The text described the women as women that had, for all their lives, been subservient to their husbands—their roles minimal and unimportant in society. But here, in this scene as Voldemort beat their King down, they were not cowering or flinching away from the brutality.

They were encouraging it—either silently or audibly, their charcoal-lined eyes staring fixedly at the way the man's back was ripped open with each lash. Their husbands were leashed and kneeling beside them, their eyes smartly on the ground beside their masters.

The women drank up the sound of the King’s screams, of the crimson of his blood staining the stone beneath the King and Voldemort's feet a muted red.

The description of the torture was oddly, disturbingly, detailed, and Harrie was perturbed by it, wondering then just who could possibly have written this.

It sounded like something straight out of a historical fantasy book rather than actual reality.

Harrie was pensive, pausing for a moment to look around her room as she debated whether to continue reading or not. This sounded very interesting—more than she cared to admit.

But could it all be true? Could all this have happened?

Everything about this text was just strange.

It was just too detailed. Too personal.

It didn’t read like something she could have ripped from a textbook or even an article. The way this was written almost made it seem like the author had been there first hand—an audience member in the crowd witnessing Voldemort overtake the Kingdom and torture their King in front of hundreds of people.

But that could not be possible. The writing was in English.

It was written with a beautiful script that belied years of experience and refinement. The swirling curl of the S and the crispness of the Ts evidence that this person had to have been educated in the modern world. Although it was, at first, quite difficult to understand, Harrie could not deny that it was elegant. She didn’t have much basis for comparison, having rather shite handwriting herself, but Harrie definitely knew that this had to have been written by someone that had spent years learning cursive.

Though that still didn’t solve the strange mystery.

The person that had written this would have to be several decades, no, centuries old, if he or she did indeed witness this spectacle. And that was just impossible, no one could really live that long. Just who was the person that had written this? Harrie did not recall seeing a name when she had begun to read, and that should have been the first thing she picked out.

Harrie was staring so hard at the screen that it was shocking it had not burst into flames. She couldn't make sense of it.

It was impossible. It was truly, completely, irrevocably, _impossible._

It had to be fiction. This had to be some sort of historical novel being written by some tired university student or bored mother.

She should have stopped reading, but she was drawn in by the narrative. There was just something about the way the person described Voldemort, about the way they depicted her radiance and her cruelty. It was as captivating as it was jarring, and Harrie could not resist it.

Her curiosity was too great, and so, she continued to read despite her many reservations.

Voldemort was standing above him, sickle-sword in hand as she was preparing to behead him. The King was resigned to his fate, his eyes closing unwittingly as he waited for the blade to press against his neck. She was glowing brightly beneath the brilliant sun—her fair skin catching the light like the most precious of diamonds. She looked breath-taking despite the malice in her eyes, the red of her irises revealing her thirst for revenge and her hunger for power.

She was no longer the helpless little girl that Harrie remembered reading at the start of the tale and it made something clench within her, her spine crawling with unease.

And then, just as Voldemort made to swing the blade, to plunge the copper deep into his neck, something came from within darkness behind her. A presence that blinded everyone in the room with a brilliant light.

The blazing white and yellow of its rays drew a pained cry from Voldemort as she was scalded by its glimmer, all while the Pharaoh grew stronger each second he stood beneath its warmth. Everyone was deathly silent as they watched, horrified and shocked at what was unfolding before them—a silence falling over the crowd at the sound of Voldemort’s sudden pained cry.

Several seconds passed before the light blinked out of existence. The shine dissipating as if it never was.

And no one said a word as the King suddenly turned his face to regard the Queen, the chains holding him down falling away. Voldemort was on her knees, her hair shorn and scattered on the ground at her sides as she pressed her hands against her face, the skin blistered and red. Voldemort, rather than healed as the King had been, was severely burned—her beautiful pale skin now, waxy and red, resembling the red of her malevolent eyes. The Queen of Serpents was trembling, but no one could find the courage to speak. Not even the King, in his shock, could utter a word.

It was a shock to all to see Voldemort’s humanity shorn away, to see her power stripped away by the blinding light. She looked nothing like the regal sorceress that had swept away the masses to her side.

And then, when she removed her hands from her face, forcing herself  to stand proudly amongst them despite the obvious pain she felt, the masses were unable to stifle their sharp gasps.

Instead of a beautiful, human face, they saw the face of a monster. A woman with the features of a snake.

Her followers were frozen with both awe and fright—watching as the King too, rose, from where he’d been forced to kneel, his arms reaching for the blade Voldemort had dropped when she’d been injured.

Twisting his fingers around the handle, the King pressed the blade against Voldemort’s face, the steel drawing forth a displeased hiss from the disfigured woman. If looks could kill, the woman would have seen the man dead. She would have seen to it that he suffered before he begged for death.

It was a look that Harrie could not even begin to imagine, one that drew a shudder up her spine despite the entire thing not being real. Harrie was not _there_. She was only reading this from between the pages of some online PDF.

It still felt frightening nevertheless.

The King was standing proudly with the blade in hand, despite the fierce glare in the woman’s eyes as he lowered the blade to her neck. It didn’t matter that the woman was at least a foot taller than he, that the Queen could smite him once her power returned. The King, after moments of searching into her serpentine face, shifted his gaze to the audience, surveying the crowd of women that stood deathly silent as they watched. He then flickered his eyes back to Voldemort’s face, his gaze drawn in or afraid of what she might do; the tale did not say.

There was distrust and sorrow swimming in his gaze when he looked into Voldemort’s infuriated eyes; the green of his irises catching brilliantly beneath the sun above like emeralds underneath the lights of lit sconces in a tomb. There was betrayal there, and deep pity, something that made the woman practically vibrate with rage as she shot him a disgusted look in return, the red in Voldemort’s eyes clashing with the green of the boy King’s eyes.

“Eternity you have sought, and eternity you shall receive.” The Pharaoh whispered, watching Voldemort’s eyes shift into something like fear before—

And then the tale ended abruptly.

Harrie was in shock, furiously clicking on the keyboard in hopes that there was more to read. The way that the story had ended left too many variables in the open, too many questions that Harrie desperately wanted answers to. But there was nothing more for her to read, the PDF was at the last page and she knew it would only be wishful thinking to expect more to magically appear.

She felt notably empty.

Hot and cold now that she’d reached the end.

Voldemort, the woman Harrie had been drawn to almost immediately upon seeing her image on the brochure, had been capable of such cruelty?

Harrie was at a loss for words—understanding now that the reason Voldemort's punishment had been so cruel was solely because she herself had pulled no punches. She had murdered and maimed all that stood between her and her goal. Crushing the opposition beneath her bare feet like vermin—her acts committed with purpose. Even though the King had been kind and trusting. All for a goal, Harrie found, that the tale never quite explained.

Harrie did not understand, and she doubted she ever would without the rest of the story. She couldn't possibly piece things together with just the scraps she’d been fed.

She felt more confused than ever, but it at least solved a few mysteries.

Like the reason for Voldemort’s frowning face and the horrific way she had been punished. All without a single mural to reveal the true extent of her influence for the coming generation to learn. Like how Voldemort came to have that serpentine face. Those little tidbits were explained, but she wanted to know _more._

“Did you enjoy reading about me, little thief?”

Harrie froze, the words hissed into her ear causing the hair at the nape of her neck to rise. She counted to ten and back, willing away the horror that dug its fingers into her gut.

_Just calm down, Harrie. Just pack up your stuff and go._

But Harrie could not will her body to cooperate—her legs as stiff as boards as she felt warm air waft against her ear, the experience distinct from all the previous instances Harrie had heard the voice.

It sounded amused, the tone doing little to calm Harrie’s suddenly racing heart as she tried to will herself to turn around and look. She knew she was panicking, but she doubted anyone else would have reacted any better in such a situation. There was a voice speaking into her head—a something she thought had left her well enough alone.

“It is interesssting just how far the old fool had gotten with his transsslating. Dr. Dumbledore wasss quite clever, but not clever enough.” The voice laughed, and Harrie gasped when she felt familiar—too familiar—fingers press against where her hairline began, trailing the digits down the exposed skin and teasing along each individual bump of her spine as it went.

The touch _burned._

It felt almost like—

“Asss for you, I believe you have sssomething that belongsss to me.”

Harrie's brows furrowed confusedly.

And then it clicked. Harrie’s mind stuttering to a stop, and then exploding with horrified realization.

The bloody mummy was here.

 _Voldemort_ was here.

And Harrie had no bloody clue what she even wanted. She had no idea how this was even _possible._

“Y-you’re—“

“Yesss, Harrie Lily Potter.” The voice murmured as her touch fell away, the absence of it doing little to comfort the distress twisting Harrie's stomach into knots.

 _Oh god_ , there was an evil mummy in her flat. This could not be happening. Harrie wanted to pinch herself.

Harry blanched.

“Return to me what you have ssstolen, little thief. And I shall overlook thisss. Grant you mercccy for pilfering from my hoard.”

Harrie didn't wait. It didn’t matter that this was impossible, she had spent days experiencing strange things. She wouldn’t ignore her instincts any longer.

She jumped, ducking away so quickly from the presence that she didn't feel when she slammed her shin against the desk’s leg, toppling the desk with her laptop still on the surface and scattering papers all over her bedroom as she ran. She heard the woman laugh and Harrie felt her lungs constrict, the tightness making it difficult to breathe—her heart pumping adrenaline through her veins as she closed her hand around the knob and forced the door open.

She heard it slam into the wall, but paid it no mind.

Property damage was the least of her concerns. Especially when there was a bloody _mummy_ in her flat. An evil, possibly deranged mummy that had almost killed her once already. A mummy that didn’t have a happy ending considering just where the tale ended.

Harrie cursed when she passed through the opening, jolting when a shadow suddenly careened in front of her,the sound of rustling cloth and laughter forcing Harrie to a full stop when she almost slammed into the faceless shadow. Her bare feet skidded on the floor, her body twisting away just in time to run into the kitchen instead, her mind absent of all thought but the need for her to move.

Harrie didn't know what she was doing, of where she intended to go, but she moved regardless, knowing for a fact that for her to stay still would be her death. She couldn’t just stand idly by, let her fear freeze her limbs, she needed to do _something_.

And so she did. She drafted a shaky plan in her mind then—the shouting in her mind and the adrenaline in her veins fueling her footsteps. She needed to get out of her flat, and the only way to do that was to distract the mummy enough to slip up.

Then again, could Harrie really outrun her? She had moved so quickly earlier. So fast that Harrie had not even felt Voldemort slip right past her and block her only means of escape. It was like the mummy had suddenly just appeared in front of her—it was like _magic._

No, Harrie could not hope to outrun her. But then what could she do? Harrie was breathing harshly as she slipped inside her kitchen, shooting the enclosed space frantic glances, as if it could somehow provide her with an answer to her plea.

And then Harrie recalled just where she was. _The kitchen._

Well, Harrie thought, if she couldn't run, then she'd fight. She had no other option left. But she wouldn’t do it barehanded. No, she doubted she would stand a chance with her fists alone. Her self defense skills were impressive—surprising for most that had seen quite how quickly and effortlessly Harrie could throw a punch, but that skill served her better against _human_ opponents. Voldemort was anything but—more a corpse than a person considering she was a dessicated corpse. She definitely couldn’t just punch the fossil in the gut, she needed something more...aggressive.

She needed a knife. Something that would give her the edge she needed should Voldemort catch her. With that in mind,  Harrie forced her legs to move faster into the kitchen, running past the the pantry and oven  as Voldemort's oppressive presence followed closely behind her.

She yanked open the first drawer she saw, seizing the only kitchen knife she owned before twisting around to face the dark figure that was less than a meter away—dark tendrils flickering out like a serpent’s tongue scenting the air. It looked like moving strings—undulating patches of fabric writhing around the black shape. Harrie squinted, but couldn't see her face, the mummy's attire hiding away features Harrie had often seen behind her eyelids as she slept.

The woman looked inhuman in that instance—more a grim reaper than a person. She was a hooded figure that dwelt between the fog and the darkened sky. The black melting into the unknown, like a void that swallowed greedily at all light that dared fall within its grip. It was like it was melding, blurring with the nightmares waiting to escape from the tight confinement in the back of one's mind.

Harrie swallowed hard, but stood her ground. She was cornered in the kitchen, the counter completely blocking her path to the living room. There was still a meter between them but her odds did not look good. She was trapped in her kitchen, but this was a conscious decision on her part. She had been denied access to the front door almost immediately after she’d forced herself out of her bedroom. This was the best she could do considering the situation.

She would just have to make the best of it.

Harrie had a knife and she knew how to defend herself. Things looked grim, but she wasn’t totally helpless. She would find a way to win. She simply had to.

"You have nowhere to run, girl. Do you really think you can harm me with that blade of yoursss?" Voldemort crooned, and Harrie shivered, unable to ignore just how affected she was by the woman's powerful presence. She glared at Voldemort when the woman began to laugh, the sound like water trickling down the wide, tree trunks.

Her voice was a rich tenor, so fluid and melodic, that Harrie felt like she’d been put in a trance. It made the edges of her vision fuzzy, made the hairs on her arm stand on end as she watched the woman’s shape undulate beneath the white light above their heads.

_It sounded so pretty—No!_

Harrie grit her teeth and lifted her knife up higher then, shaking off the powerful enchantment that had fallen over her at hearing such a lovely sound. She shot Voldemort a glower, the warning clear in her gaze as Voldemort laughed once more until the the sound died into soft chuckles, and then to silence. Harrie felt her skin shivered at just how affected she was, cursing this strange magic hanging in the air.

There was a long pause before Voldemort spoke again.

"Where is it?" Voldemort inquired, and Harrie frowned confusedly at the woman.

_Where was what?_

_"_ I don't know what you're talking about," Harrie began but stopped immediately, her words robbed from her tongue when she felt the room drop several degrees, the tendrils that had been writhing around the woman suddenly stilling, seemingly frozen by the chill that had settled around them. "I didn't take _anything_ that belonged to you."

 _Did she?_ Harrie thought, trying to think back to anything she could have taken, only to draw a blank.

Voldemort was silent for a moment, and then the shadows began to recede. The darkness pulled away like the tide on the night of a new moon, revealing pale, milky skin to Harrie’s wide eyes. The woman’s skin was almost translucent, glimmering like the scales of a serpent as the shadows continued to dissipate, revealing more and more of the woman's features.

Harrie’s mind went silent. All thought of Voldemort’s demands quickly evaporating like water in a hot afternoon. Tongue tied, she was unable to string two thoughts together as she tried to make sense of the woman that stood before her now.

If Voldemort as a dried out corpse had been imposing before—the picture of inhuman elegance; then alive, Voldemort could only be described as _otherworldly._ She was like a ghost—her skin so pale that it looked more like carved bone than actual skin. And Harrie, for all her efforts, could not look away, even when a voice in the back of her mind whispered for her to turn away.

Voldemort’s cheeks were high and prominent, framing her face pleasingly. And her jaw was just as sharp, if not more so, lending to the woman a skeletal appearance that had not been there when Harrie had seen her in the museum. There was no softness to her, just hard edges and lines that bespoke of violence and cruelty. And the absence of her nose, just thin slits where her nostrils were meant to be, rather than disturb or interrupt the flawlessness of her face, seemed only to amplify the woman's ethereal glow. It was completely at odds with the description Harrie had read in the text. Voldemort was not deformed and blistered. Voldemort was serpentine, just as depicted, but she was still, admittedly, beautiful.

 _Resplendent and evocative_ , Harrie thought helplessly.

And then Harrie, almost drawn by some unseen force, locked her eyes with Voldemort’s, catching sight of the cruelty hidden beneath those vivid red eyes that Harrie knew for a fact she had seen before. They were the eyes that had looked into her own through the darkness of her bedroom, right when all the strange things started.

Harrie’s breath came quickly, catching on her lungs uncomfortably as she took in the crimson of those eyes—the vivid color just as described by the author. It was a true representation, though the writing in a book didn't hold a candle to the sight of those eyes in person. There were flecks of different hues of red, the glow of the lightbulb above casting them in an almost greenish tint.

It was a punch in the stomach to be at the end of those eyes. And Harrie felt weak, her legs like jelly.

Voldemort was hauntingly magnetic, a pull to her that both repulsed and attracted, dancing that thin line with its extraordinary compulsion. Swallowing thickly, Harrie was not sure which of the two emotions curling in her gut was which. She wasn’t sure if it was attraction or horror,  terror or desire. The emotions twisted around her belly uncomfortably and Harrie wanted to stifle them both.

Her knife wavered within her hands, but Harrie quickly stamped the trembling down. She couldn’t afford to show any more weakness than she already had.

And just when Harrie managed to rein herself in, to soothe some of the panic in her thoughts, she felt her mouth go dry when the shadows continued to recede.The hand clutching tightly onto the knife nearly releasing the handle when Voldemort's throat was revealed, followed by her collarbone, and chest; her skin smooth as polished marble.

 _Oh my god_ , Harrie’s mind supplied as she watched, transfixed, as the dark cloak wrapped around Voldemort’s body began to melt away.

The cloak was translucent by the time the magic had eaten away at the darkness, the sheer material of the dress growing more and more evident the longer Harrie watched her. Harrie didn’t know what to say, could hardly take in a breath when all of the black evaporated and Voldemort’s generous breasts were revealed to her gaze, the woman’s nipples as pale as the pale flesh surrounding it.

Harrie was disturbed by how affected she was by the display. She'd never reacted this viscerally to a woman's nudity before. She had admired many from a distance—even developed a mild crush on Cho Chang back in high school when they'd spent an inordinate amount of time together. It was a small thing—innocent and sweet like the candies Ron liked to buy down at the shops back home.

But this, this was different.

Harrie felt like she was on fire. Her fingers itched to touch her skin; thick with the same urge she'd felt when she had stood over Voldemort’s corpse at the museum. It coursed through her veins, it bit at her ears and licked at her skin. It _wanted_ and Harrie did not know what to do. She wanted to close the gap between them more than she wanted to flee, to taste the woman’s skin between her teeth.

She ached for it, and Harrie was horrified at the sharp turn her thoughts had taken.

Harrie fought the desire down, watching as the darkness finally dissipated in its entirety, revealing all of Voldemort to her stare. Voldemort’s sheath dress was flowing out, so long that it dragged on the ground below. It was thin—too thin—revealing more skin than Harrie had originally believed Egyptian culture permitted. The neckline was so low that Harrie could see the top of Voldemort's breasts. But what did such a plunging neckline matter when the material was so thin that Harrie could see where the woman’s nipples were pressed against the fabric?

Harrie felt both embarrassed and ashamed at how hard she was staring.

But she truly could not help herself, not when there was something thick in the air—something that Harrie knew so little of. She was almost grateful for the small mercy she found when her gaze flickered down, noting then that the material was thickest right where Voldemort’s hips began, hiding away toned legs and _more_ from her eyes.

 _Get it together, Harrie!_ She shouted at herself, ripping her gaze away from where the woman’s hips flared, to take in the woman in her entirety.

It was then that Harry noticed just how tall the woman was—her mind sobering momentarily to take in the imposing figure of a woman that had had Egypt wrapped around her finger.

She could easily tower over Ron—her thin form making her look even more skeletal now that Harrie was no longer sucked in by the magnetism of Voldemort’s eyes, or _other_ aspects of her body. She ignored the pale skin revealed by the fabric, to take in the bangles on both of Voldemort’s wrists, the metal bands glinting a bright silver beneath the light above their heads. Harrie could see strange carving patterns on the jewelry, but she was unable to decipher what they meant. The symbols resembled the strange language Harrie had seen in the museum, and again, she was seized by that strange emotion that made her thoughts scatter.

Harrie felt breathless as she looked. Awed and perturbed all at once.

This wasn't _normal_ , she realized. Understanding dawning on her when her hands continued to shake, not with fear as she had thought originally, but with a burning need to reach out. A desire to bridge the gap between them and trail her hand against the woman's seemingly smooth skin and learn if Voldemort was truly as sharp as she looked.

Harrie bit her tongue hard when Voldemort's lips twisted into a smirk. Red eyes glittering brightly with amusement, and Harrie tried not to let it affect her when Voldemort stepped closer, her breasts catching Harrie's eyes like the most precious of jewels.

Harrie tried to ignore it, focusing instead on Voldemort's hands, to the spidery-fingers with black tinted nails.

The woman’s fingers were thin, and spidery. The digits long and calloused, belaying a life of hard work. But her nails were black and sharpened into sharp points that Harrie knew could draw blood with just a slight press of them against skin.

There were a series of rings on three of the sorceress’s fingers. Squinting her gaze, her glasses hanging low on her nose, Harrie noted that those twisting rings were in fact _snakes_ winding along the joints. It reminded Harrie of vines wrapped snuggly around trees, reaching for the sunlight at the tops of the canopy.

It made the woman look positively lethal. Beautiful, but dangerous all the same.

"Stop it," Harrie cautioned, lifting the knife up higher when Voldemort continued to move closer, the woman's gaze boring into Harrie's green, horrified eyes. "I don't know what magic this is. But stop, don't mess with my bloody mind."

Harrie could feel the compulsion writhing beneath her skin like insects, crooning and urging her to touch. The desire to reach out was strong, the sensation like writhing snakes as Harrie tried to stamp out the almost nauseous feeling to hold onto her self-control.

Voldemort came to a sudden halt, surprise flickering behind her gaze before disappearing too quickly for Harrie to digest. If Harrie had blinked she would have missed it entirely, the flicker like a lightbulb snapping in and out of power.

Voldemort's face was blank of all emotion, and it made something within Harrie clench unpleasantly.

"Return to me what you have taken and thisss will all ssstop," Voldemort stated instead, her body frozen in its place.

Harrie's face twisted into a look of confusion,  just as confused this time as she was the first time she'd heard the woman's demand. She hadn't bloody taken anything! What was this woman even talking about?

Harrie’s lips pressed into a frown as she tried to understand just what the woman was getting at. How many times did she have to repeat this? She didn’t know what Voldemort wanted, and it made her fingers curl with the desire to simply run. Her fear was palpable—her unease and terror warring with her own instinctive desire to both fight and give in to the suffocating heat swirling in her gut.

Voldemort frowned at her then, her eyes narrowing into thin slits at Harrie's less than amicable reaction.

"I told you I didn’t—"

" _Liesss_ ," Voldemort interrupted, anger twisting her face into an angry scowl.

It made her look demonic; the milky color of her skin and the fire in her eyes made more pronounced by the ugly sneer that bloomed on her face.

Harrie felt her lungs tighten, but otherwise did not react. She needed to keep it together.

But it wasn’t just fear that had her feeling apprehensive. No, if she was just afraid, then perhaps she could have handled this better. She could have blustered forward with false bravado and reckless reactions. Fear, Harrie was familiar with. She knew how to address it, how to gather all her courage to counteract the screaming in the back of her mind. There was courage in fear—in the sound of her own blood rushing through her head as she thought of a million ways to defeat the nauseating emotion.

She was quite proficient at stamping out that traitorous emotion. But , to her chagrin, it was not the only emotion dancing inside her head. There was something hot licking at her skin, Voldemort's presence doing something to her that she could not name. It was unidentifiable—mutable and transient as it circuited through each of her veins, from within the network of capillaries in her lungs.

Harrie couldn't help but wonder if this power was the reason why women in Egypt had turned their backs on their husbands? Leaving their way of life in order to live under this woman's feet?

It certainly felt like Voldemort had done something to herself that wasn't just the power of her appearance. There was more to this, Harrie just knew it.

"Where is my _locket?_ " Voldemort seethed, and Harrie glowered in response. She shuttered away the strange emotions, letting her frustration and anger from the last several weeks leak into the surface. She forced all memory of her fear, and all thought of her current unease to a place where she could deal with it later.

If Harrie couldn't handle this disaster, how fit was she to even be a cop?

"I don't know where it bloody is! I am telling you I didn't take anything," Harrie shouted, and she felt rather than saw the moment Voldemort lost her patience. It was like the temperature of the room suddenly dropped several degrees before exploding with heat. Harrie flinched in response, sensitive to the shift.

Harrie swallowed a gasp when Voldemort began to move once again, and Harrie, almost instinctively, lifted the knife up in warning—poised to spear Voldemort through the chest.

Harrie had never hurt a person like this before. She'd punched Draco in the nose for being a complete tosser to Ron and Hermione back in high school. But it was nothing like _this_. Stabbing someone was nothing like punching someone in the face. It made something sick flutter in the back of her mind, a sort of distress that Harrie had never experienced before, but could understand at some objective level.

She was afraid of killing this woman. The woman had already been dead, but she definitely looked alive at this moment. What if the knife hit something it shouldn't and the woman bled out in the middle of her kitchen? What if she actually killed her? Could she even actually kill a mummy? The thoughts came a mile a minute, but Harrie seized on the immediate need to defend herself.

Harrie was frightened of even the possibility of killing someone, even a mummy, but she did not release her grip on the knife.

It was the only protection she had, and to discard it while in front of a predator would be stupid. She _knew_ this, was convinced of this fact, and she watched with baited breath as Voldemort slipped ever closer.

Voldemort, as if sensing Harrie's intentions, took in the hard set to Harrie's jaw, and suddenly waved her hand.

It was the only warning Harrie had before she felt an unseen force shove her harshly against the fridge centimeters behind her, the handle digging into her back, and ripping a pained cry from her lips. Her grip on the knife slackened, but she did not let it go despite the sharp pains shooting up her spine.

She couldn't let it go. It was all she had to defend herself with.

Harrie shouted when Voldemort waved her arm once more, and the pressure thrust so harshly between her ribs that she couldn't draw in air. The knife was yanked out of her hands and embedded itself a millimeter from her left cheek, the metal severing several strands of her hair.

That had been _much_ too close.

If Harrie had not been currently struggling for air, she might have been more afraid of the fact that she had almost had her face sliced into. But it was the least of her concerns when the force continued to press and press until all air was robbed from her lungs. She wheezed, a croaked choking sound slipping from her parted lips as Voldemort's bare feet smacked against the tiled floor, closing the short gap between them until she was inches from Harrie's face. Her taller body leaning downward until their faces were level.

Her red eyes burned into Harrie's own, and she swore that if she currently wasn't being choked to death, the proximity of Voldemort's eyes to her own would have stolen her breath.

" _Do not lie to me,_ " Voldemort whispered, her warm breath fanning across Harrie's face as she spoke.

Harrie was shaking so badly that it was embarrassing. Humiliating even. She had always taken pride at handling shite situations well. Prepared even when frightened out of her wits. But there was no preparing for this—no anticipating that a bloody mummy would suddenly come to life and attack her.

She didn't sign up for this.

And then Voldemort lifted her pale hand up and pressed her sharp nails against her cheek, digging them so harshly into the skin that she felt blood blooming. It was an innocuous gesture, seemingly innocent despite the sting as it sliced from her cheekbone to the corner of her lip.

Feeling the corners of her eyes begin to darken from the lack of air, Harrie watched helplessly and struggled for breath as Voldemort continued to touch with a pensive look in her eyes.

Harrie felt like a fish out of water.

Seconds trickled by, and just as Harrie thought she might pass out from the absence of air, the pressure evaporated. Her lungs that screamed for precious air, suddenly contracting with the force Harrie’s desperate gasps. Her mind raced, limbs shaking from tipping too close to unconsciousness as Voldemort continued to touch her.

And then Voldemort slipped her fingers from her cheek to tease at her throat, wrapping the hand around Harrie’s neck before pushing her  roughly against the wall.

It made her skin crawl. Voldemort’s hands were so cold that it felt like death itself was gripping her neck.

“Return to me what is mine, Harrie. I am not above breaking you.”

Voldemort watched her with a veiled expression—a heat in her eyes that made Harrie’s cheeks burn despite the pounding in her head. It felt like she’d been shaken several times over—a migraine settling at her temples from being deprived of oxygen.

It was nonsensical to bother with embarrassment when she’d _almost died_ a second time—when she was tipping too close to the edge of unconsciousness, her mind frantic with its need to breathe.

It had to be the strange magic hanging over Voldemort’s gaze—robbing Harrie of both her sanity and agency.

She hated how powerless it made her feel—the loss of control tasting bitter in the back of her throat. So she did what she did best.

Harrie kicked out, satisfaction blooming in her chest when she began to repeatedly strike at the woman’s ankle. An ache formed at the heel of her foot with each hit, the discomfort quickly morphing into pain, but Harrie did not stop. She preferred this pain to the feeling of helplessness and panic that had seized her earlier, and so Harrie fought, even if she didn’t have a knife in hand. Her other hand reached out, wrapping her shaking fingers around Voldemort’s thin wrist before yanking on it as hard as she could.

She’d rather be in pain than helpless. She’d rather go down fighting than bare her neck and submit. She refused to be a victim. She wasn’t some puppet whose strings could be toyed with.

But Voldemort, despite Harrie’s vicious kicking and bruising grip on the woman’s wrist, did not react.

There was no pained cry. No subtle shift in the woman’s stance. She was perfectly still, her fingers trailing along Harrie’s throat as if Harrie had not been kicking her with as much force as she could, or trying to pry the woman’s fingers from her windpipe.

Harrie was both infuriated and panicked. The amalgamation of feelings making her movements desperate.

_Is there nothing I can do?_

Harrie clenched her jaw, and struck Voldemort with her freehand then, jabbing harshly into Voldemort’s solar plexus with enough force that Harrie released a pained groan from the impact. Harrie felt her skin tear at the knuckles—the burn a testament to how hard she had hit the woman. She swung again when Voldemort failed to react, and kicked out once more.

She was pinned to the fridge, but Harrie refused to stay still, kicking and punching with a fierce grip on the woman’s arm.

She wasn’t bound. She could move. And she took complete advantage of that.

Harrie continued to thrash and fight. To claw at Voldemort’s wrist with as much strength as she had. Her muscles screamed for her to stop, exhausted and strained from the rapidity of her movements.

Harrie ignored it all until her body refused to comply—her muscles like lead.

Harrie was panting by the end of it, her breathing coming short. Harrie felt like she’d run a marathon. Her lungs heaving, her arms and legs aching with the exertion of struggling the way she was, but it she’d gladly do it again.

And then, Voldemort struck, the motion so quick Harrie failed to anticipate it.

Harrie’s mouth parted in surprise when the woman squeezed her throat viciously. Harrie tried to breathe, both her arms scrambling up to grip the woman’s wrist tightly between her hands, to pry them from her neck. But Voldemort’s fingers were stubbornly wrapped around Harrie’s neck, her nails biting so harshly into her skin that it stung. Harrie kicked and dug her own nails in turn into the woman’s wrist, but the woman did not relent. Her arms were like steel as they continued to squeeze.

_Did the woman not feel pain? What the bloody fuck was this mummy even made of?_

Harrie was shocked, her mind unable to wrap around her surprise and lightheadedness.

And then Voldemort’s eyes snapped to her own—the gesture so sudden that Harrie did not know how to react. Her mind went silent as she tried to make sense of the emotion swirling strangely behind Voldemort’s eyes, her tongue lolling from her mouth when Voldemort squeezed her throat even tighter, obstructing her esophagus completely. Harrie released a choked sound, her fingers squeezing onto Voldemort’s wrists for dear life. She felt utterly trapped and confined by the power in those eyes, her vision swirling as her lungs protested for air.

The woman’s eyes were glittering like gems—frustration, delight, and approval dancing so intimately together in the red that Harrie could not pick out which was which. Harrie, transfixed by the different gradients in the woman’s eyes, simply could not look away. Even if Voldemort had not been choking her, Harrie knew that she wouldn’t be able to rip her eyes away, despite her own mind screaming for her to fight.

She wanted to break the connection between their gazes—to stifle the strange energy licking at her flesh, teasing and whispering at her mind to simply give in, and to rip the woman’s cold hand from her throat. But the longer she looked, the more difficult it became to will herself to fight. The whisper grew steadily louder with each second Harrie continued to stare helplessly into Voldemort’s eyes—the screaming in the back of her mind urging her to tear her gaze away, growing fainter and fainter as she fell nearer to unconsciousness.

Harrie felt like she was being devoured.

She hardly noticed when Voldemort finally ceased squeezing her neck, taking in a shaky breath into her lungs, mesmerized by the different shades of red in Voldemort’s eyes as the woman’s the sharp nails scratched low on her throat, dragging one lone finger to where her pulse thrummed wildly at her neck. Harrie exhaled when the woman dug her nail lightly against her carotid artery—the gesture enough to release her from the lightheaded stupor only the woman’s eyes could put her under.

It was both a threat and a promise, and Harrie swallowed audibly, the sound loud in the heavy silence that had fallen between them.

She parted her lips to say something, to break the strange tension between them.

But then Voldemort smiled—her lips twisting into a wide grin that exposed perfectly straight white teeth, and the words vanished like cigarette smoke seeping from one’s lips.

The smile looked wrong somehow—foreign on the woman’s face despite the practiced ease with which the woman did it. It might have looked seamless to anyone else that was at the other side of the grin, but Harrie knew, could feel like a heavy weight on her shoulders, that there was something _wrong_ about it.

Harrie jerked back, and froze when she realized Voldemort had practically molded their bodies together; her presence so imposing that Harrie struggled to take in air. Voldemort was monstrous compared to her own smaller stature and it made her all too aware of the danger she was in.

Harrie craned her neck to keep the woman’s face within sight—carefully avoiding the woman’s eyes by focusing on the skin between her eyes lest she get sucked into their strange connection.

Seconds passed with Voldemort’s hand still tracing along her skin before Harrie heard Voldemort whisper something strange beneath her breath; the words thick and unintelligible.

And then Harrie felt something shimmer against her skin before she was lifted by an unseen force, her body practically _floating_ mid-air. Her toes slipped away from the ground, her bare feet dangling and twisting to find her balance as Voldemort straightened into her full height and Harrie rose higher from the ground, only to stop when she was perfectly level with Voldemort’s own impressive stature.

Harrie’s stomach turned and twisted, her nerves fraying when Voldemort hissed something else underneath her breath, and Harrie could no longer move. She could wiggle her fingers—but this small mercy did nothing to silence the panic suddenly ripping through her. She wanted to kick and scratch, to bite and claw, but she couldn’t bloody move.

_Shite._

Harrie swallowed before squashing that fear to the furthest corner of her mind, ignoring the screaming in her head urging her to beg, before gathering all the bravery she possessed to glower at the woman.

She seized all of her anger and determination, channeling all of her frustrations into the single look in the hopes that it hid the churning of her gut.

Voldemort ignored the look and leaned into Harrie’s space, her face so close that Harrie could count the individual lashes of each eye—could see where the charcoal was painted onto the corners of her eyes, making the woman’s irises burn a brighter, angry red.

_It almost seemed like Voldemort was—_

“I have killed many for less than what you have done.”

Breath catching, Harrie watched as Voldemort pressed her forehead against her Harrie’s—the touch shooting electricity straight up her spine from such a simple gesture. Jerking, Harrie tried to lean back, nauseated by the sudden wave of happiness and desire that warmed her skin. But there was nowhere for her to go.

The sensation was noxious and suffocating, the desire so thick in her esophagus that Harrie felt like she might choke on it. The emotion didn’t feel like her at all. The feeling felt _foreign_.

Voldemort’s touch made her feel like someone else. Like she wasn’t quite alone in her own mind. And she hated it. She felt defiled.

“I have done _nothing_ but defend myself against some bloody ma—“

“If you dare finish that sentence, I promise that I will show you the true meaning of pain. I can spend hours here, branding this lesson onto your flesh,” Voldemort stated simply, her tone neither angry nor upset, but malicious as she pressed pressed her fingers more firmly against Harrie’s throat, her nails digging so deeply into the skin that Harrie failed to repress a sharp hiss from escaping her lips when it cut. Harrie felt something trickle down her neck, and she swallowed through the fear curling in her stomach when Voldemort continued to touch and tease the skin despite drawing blood.

Voldemort would hurt her if she spoke out of turn. The threat so evident in her tone that Harrie would have to be deaf to not be able to notice. But, Harrie thought, that did not explain the challenge in Voldemort’s tone nor the mocking glimmer in her gaze. There was a smugness lurking in those eyes that seemed almost...playful, and Harrie felt chafed by the show. It was as if the woman was delighting in her suffering.

_How dare she?_

Miffed, Harrie could not repress her snarl of anger. She bared her teeth at Voldemort, growing more incensed when Voldemort’s lips twitched into a wider smile—her eyes dancing with mirth and amusement. It was almost as if the woman didn’t think Harrie was a threat at all, and it severely pissed her off.

If she wasn’t sure before that the woman was mocking her, then she was definitely sure of it now _._

Harrie clutched onto her anger like a vice—drinking up the emotion because that was all that she could really do under such dire circumstances. Since Voldemort had materialized before her, she had felt off balance and unlike herself—as if she were wading through an ocean rather than a tub of warm bath water she had some semblance control over. It felt _good_ to be angry. Harrie wanted to wind the emotion around her shoulders,to use it as a barrier for the fire of Voldemort’s magic caressing her skin.

It was the only thing keeping her grounded. Harrie refused to let it go.

Harrie spat at Voldemort, taking the dare. It was perhaps the dumbest thing she could have done, and she knew it from the moment the dollop of spit landed on the woman’s cheek, but Harrie felt victorious nevertheless.

She was proud of doing something, at least . Voldemort had taken from her the ability to move, but that did not mean she couldn’t mouth off.

" _Fuck you_ ," Harrie finished, delighting in the way Voldemort’s grin fell like a decayed tree, the speck of saliva on her cheek fizzling out before evaporating from her pristine skin. She knew that there would be consequences, having been choked twice already since Voldemort had appeared. It was expected, and Harrie was resigned to it.

_Let her._

Harrie didn’t give a single shite. If she was going to die of a mummy, she would rather die on her feet than on her knees. Even more so if she would remain master of herself as she suffered. If the agony meant that she would remain _herself_ and not some puppet that starved for the woman’s touch, then she’d gladly take punishment.

She couldn’t stomach another instance of that strange voice crooning for her to give in. To let Voldemort take her into her arms and—

And then Voldemort hissed something sharp beneath her breath, similar to the susurrate Harrie had heard before Voldemort had nearly choked the life out of her. It was a soft sound, one that anyone would have thought nothing of. But Harrie had nearly been strangled twice already after hearing it; she knew it wasn’t some innocuous sound. Harmless was the last thing on her mind as Harrie tensed, preparing for the worst.

She tried not to stare at the way Voldemort’s lips shaped the words, forcing her mind to focus on the danger that it posed rather than how Voldemort’s voiced dropped. A huskiness in her voice that, Harrie registered, wasn’t present at all when she spoke in English.

She counted forward and back, trying to ignore the itch of her skin, of the burning on the tips of her fingers when Harrie saw Voldemort’s tongue peek from between her lips as she spoke, but failed. She was riveted by the appendage, her dread and anticipation momentarily overridden by the vision.

And then, _pain._

Pain beyond recognition; so thick and oppressive that Harrie forgot completely about the woman’s serpentine tongue.

Harrie screamed, her skin feeling like it was melting right off her bones. She writhed, her nails digging into the palms of her hands as she tried to make sense of what was happening. It was so much pain—and it was relentless.

It was not the throbbing pulse of a broken leg—of bone snapping and being deprived of motion. It was the hand crushing the broken limb, of fingers pressing onto bruised skin until the ache was permanently ingrained into the flesh. It was the fire on one’s skin, a heat that ate away at flesh until there was nothing but bone, nerve-endings nothing but charred remains. It was a thousand needles pressed beneath the sensitive layer of one’s ribs—penetrating the quivering skin and ripping away at muscle.

Harrie was screaming so loud that she wondered if anyone in the neighboring flats could hear her. Her throat felt raw, her vocal chords straining from the force of her cries as she tried to twist beneath the powerful magic, but was denied, her limbs stubbornly refusing to cooperate.

“I can keep you here for hours, _little girl_ ,” Voldemort murmured the threat into her ear, pushing her fingers away from Harrie’s trembling throat to press it at the center of her chest, right above her beating heart. And then she leaned in closer still, pressing Harrie further into the fridge with a hard shove. With a hot breath fanning against her ear, Voldemort touched her lips against the trembling skin before speaking in a soft, husky tone.

“I can keep you at the cusp of agony, take you beyond heights your young mind is capable of understanding.” And Harrie believed her, her pain increasing the longer she was kept under the curse—or whatever it was that Voldemort had done.

She wanted it to stop. But she bit her tongue and stifled the sounds that wanted to escape instead.

She would rather die than beg.

“S-someone will— _Ah_!” Harrie tried to speak through the agony, but at the sight of Voldemort’s displeased face, the pain swelled, tearing a scream right out of her throat before she could even finish.

“No one is coming to save you, little thief. It just you and I. No one can hear your screams,” Voldemort murmured almost affectionately into her ear.

Harrie was coming apart at the seams.

"Tell me where my locket is, Harrie,” the woman crooned but Harrie simply shook her head, tears gathering at the corners of her eyes as the suffering seemed to build. It felt like her nails were being ripped straight out from the bed of her fingers. The tear jagged and unclean—the sharp pain twining around her spine making white spots dance across her gaze.

It was a miracle she hadn’t lost her glasses with how desperately she was jerking her head. The only real part of her body that she could actually move despite Voldemort’s face against her ear.

“You'll find I can be very... persuasive,” Voldemort continued, her lips moving against Harrie’s ear, and Harrie bit her cheek until it bled when another wave of pure suffering racked her trembling body. “Tell me where it is.”

Another shot of pain, and Harrie felt another scream threaten to seep out past her lips. She couldn’t have answered Voldemort even if she wanted to; her ears buzzing with how loudly she had been screaming earlier and the rush of blood pulsing in time with her heartbeat. She couldn’t hear any of the words Voldemort said, and Harrie knew, more than ever, that she was losing her bloody mind.

_Oh god, please make it stop._

Harrie released her cheek from between her teeth, unclenched her jaw and screamed. She felt Voldemort laugh softly into her ear before she closed her teeth around her ear, sinking her sharp teeth into her skin viciously. Harrie whimpered, the sharp pain gradually overshadowed by another pulse of pain that rocked her—her eyes snapping shut immediately when it felt like her spine was being bent in three different directions, like her bones were being crushed into a fine dust.

With a pleased sound, Voldemort finally released her grip on Harrie’s ear, leaning back to take in Harrie’s pained expression. And then Harrie caught Voldemort’s gaze in her own, heat shooting up her spine instantly on contact. Harrie wanted to be sick—torn in two completely directions by the urge to sink into the wave of pleasure the simple gesture evoked and the agony that made her feel like her skin was being surgically removed with a dull blade.

“Y-y-you’re sick!” Harrie croaked out, only to release a pained groan, the heat lapping over her skin.

It was revolting. It was mental, the way this noxious yearning licked at her skin and settled into the gaps she didn’t know existed between her ribs. At the way the pain sunk its fangs into the marrow of her bones, her toes curling and her navel clenching each time the strange wisp of pleasure mingled too closely with the agony pulsing beneath her quivering skin.

“There have been many before you who have admired me. Their devotion the sweetest ambrosia on my tongue.” Voldemort stated, her gaze holding Harrie’s hostage as Harrie tried uselessly to fight off the strange emotions coiling within her. “Many who have found completion in serving _me_.”

“And yet, _you_ …” Harrie gasped when the pain suddenly ceased, Voldemort’s hand whipping out and digging into her hair to pull on the strands and bear Harrie’s throat to her gaze. “You _fight_ . You are compelled by my allure, enchanted and delighted even, but you are capable of _thought_ in my presence.”

Voldemort’s sounded impressed.

Harrie’s thoughts stuttered to a stop as she tried to make sense of what was even happening.

_This is madness._

“You steal from me, unknowingly bringing a curse over your head. A fate, perhaps, worse than death. Do you know how many there have been before you? How many have already fallen prey to my magic as I have appeared before them?...I have lost count, dear Harrie.” Voldemort grinned and Harrie felt ice shoot through her veins.

Voldemort looked lethal.

“They gave in so easily to the curse. Hardly any fight left in them once I took them.” Voldemort clenched her fingers and Harrie winced—her scalp unusually sensitive.

“ _Eternity you have sought, and eternity you shall receive_ , the punishment I was given for hungering for more. For wanting to purge Egypt, and then the world, of the unworthy.” Voldemort stated simply, and Harrie was thrown by the rapid shifting of Voldemort’s emotions, noting how disgust, delight, and amusement danced along the red like a kaleidoscope of color. Harrie did not understand what the woman was even talking about.

The phrase sounded oddly familiar, but she was hard pressed to recall a single thing when Voldemort was talking about mass genocide.

The phrase was the least of her concerns.

“I have lived for centuries, imprisoned in that sarcophagus—watching as my magic tempted those that neared my tomb. It was always a delight to watch the light fade from their eyes— _blind devotion_ in their gaze as I drank up their life force. Waiting for the moment my power was sufficient to break that King’s curse.”

“What are you even—“

“Seven girls for seven items. My most prized possessions turned into chains to hold me. Perhaps, if I had not killed all the women that had come across my tomb, I would have been found by your archeologists sooner.” Voldemort laughed, and Harrie felt her breath catch—the melodic sound cutting through her confusion and growing fear like a hot blade to butter.

“The locket was the last. The final piece to my escape. And you have fed it so generously in the time that it is has been in your possession, Harrie.”

Harrie felt like she was going to be sick, a strangled breath leaving her lips when Voldemort suddenly pressed her lips lightly against her own. The soft touch of her lips awakening a hunger Harrie did not understand, the beast clawing for release from the tight confinement Harrie forced it in.

She was frightened by it, making to jerk her head away, but Voldemort, as if sensing her intentions, prevented her from doing so by tightening her grip on her hair. It felt like her hair was going to be torn off from her scalp with how brutally Voldemort clutched it.

“But—“ Voldemort murmured against her lips, the motion causing shivers to crawl up Harrie’s spine. “I require the soul of someone willing.”

Harrie was shocked by the declaration, her heart accelerating at the various implications of such a phrase.

 _Is she going to kill me?_ Harrie wondered faintly as the woman stared into her eyes with their lips still pressed intimately together.

“I have murdered many on my path to freedom, Harrie. I was expecting to kill you as well, and nearly succeeded before you fled,” Voldemort intoned into her lips, and Harrie winced when Voldemort’s grip tightened further before it gentled—her fingers playing with Harrie’s wild hair. It reminded Harrie of the times she would dig her own fingers in Hermione’s cat, Crookshanks, fur when they had been children.

Harrie felt both insulted and disturbed by the look of delight in Voldemort’s eyes.

“I had planned to kill you here and now, you know. I was quite...displeased with how easily you managed to tear yourself away from my influence. No _one_ —” Voldemort paused, her gaze flickering to where Harrie’s parted lips were pressed against her own, before shifting to Harrie’s green eyes, “—had quite managed to do so successfully. You can imagine my concerns.”

Harrie, in fact, could not imagine her concerns at all. Utterly terrified by just what was unfolding before her eyes, the heat in Voldemort’s gaze and the way the woman’s lips stretched into a grin doing little for her sanity.

“I wanted to punish you, sweet little thief. Not only for stealing my locket but for managing to run away.” Voldemort slid the hand pressed intimately against her chest between her breasts, up her neck, stopping only when it reached the swell of her cheek bone, her nails dangerously close to her right eye as she murmured the threat into Harrie’s lips. Her nails caressing the skin before they fell away.

Harrie didn’t know what to expect from the woman. Voldemort was bent. Absolutely mad, and that was perhaps just as frightening, if not more so, than the strange attraction still clawing for her to lean in. To allow the woman to gauge her eyes out, if the woman so desired.

“And then, not only do you run away, dear Harrie. You _lie_ to me. It is almost as if you want me to kill you,” Voldemort laughed, the dangerous note in the sound drawing shivers up Harrie’s spine.

“I’m telling you I didn’t—” Harrie tried to protest, but was promptly cut off by the sound of something rustling  from somewhere between their bodies. Harrie wanted to flinch away, to pry her lips away from Voldemort’s mouth.  But something silenced all thought of fighting—perhaps it was that strange hiss muttering in her brain or the swirling in Voldemort’s gaze. Harry wasn’t sure, overcome with this urge to give in to the promise lurking within the woman’s eyes.

She felt something thin and hard press against her stomach, and Harrie froze, her mind breaking away from the strange trance that had fallen over her. Staring helplessly at Voldemort’s face, Harrie felt Voldemort’s lips as they spoke against her own, her eyes scrutinizing her emerald gaze.

“But I will not kill you, sweet little thief. I find the notion of breaking you a much more interesting prospect.”

Something dark flashed within Voldemort’s gaze, and it was all the warning Harrie had before Voldemort slid the unknown object from her navel, the sound of fabric tearing interrupting the short silence that had fallen between them, to where the collar of her oversized T-shirt ended.

Harrie panicked, her mind in knots as she tried to tug her head from Voldemort’s grip, her eyes staring helplessly into Voldemort’s own, unable to look away as she was undressed.

_She couldn’t really—_

“I cannot use you as a sacrifice because you no longer satisfy the clause of the curse. But there are certainly other uses for you, Harrie.”

“ _Don’t you dare—!”_ Harrie shouted, ignoring the pressure of Voldemort’s soft lips on hers to speak. But then the thin object was smoothing over her hip, slicing through her sweatpants and through her underwear.

A visceral fear shot through her spine, and Harrie tried to fight against the invisible bonds that kept her in place. Ignoring the pleased purr that left Voldemort’s lips when she was finally exposed to her gaze, her mouth burned against hers despite its feather-like touch. All while Voldemort maintained a perfectly steady grip on her hair, the strands tangled between her fingers.

Harrie was burning with shame and…something else she did not wish to name. The power of Voldemort’s magic licking across her skin like tongues as it teased along her breasts, traced along her shoulders and neck, pressed against her arse and thighs—too close to where her fluids began to form and gather.

She felt slick—the disgust and desire so at odds with one another that Harrie cried out when Voldemort twinned her fingers even tighter around her head and forced Harrie’s head closer, the soft pressure between their mouths becoming more violent. Harrie felt the woman’s tongue tease along her bottom lip with a skill that Harrie herself lacked, and shook her head in a pitiful attempt to ignore the pleasant tingles such a gesture caused.

Voldemort’s tongue was long and forked, tasting along the seam of Harrie’s mouth before sucking Harrie’s bottom lip into her mouth and biting the flesh hard enough to bruise. Harrie gasped, and then Voldemort was slipping her tongue into her mouth, teasing at her gums, coaxing her own tongue to move along with her own, and licking the roof of her mouth.

All while, Voldemort continued to watch her with her too red eyes—the heat in them mimicking the desire Harrie felt blossoming just beneath her navel.

And then Harrie bit down—clutching onto her lucidity to revel in the pained hiss Voldemort released. Harrie wanted to grin, to smirk at her because she was capable of fighting this connection. She was capable of something that others were not able to do. She didn’t know the reason for this, but she wouldn’t question it. Her willpower had already saved her from imminent death once before, now all she had to do was make the best of it.

Voldemort ripped her bloodied mouth away from Harrie’s, anger and something else swirling in them, before the magic holding Harrie firmly in place, vanished and Harrie stumbled into the woman’s arms.

Harrie lashed out, punching the woman straight in the face, and Harrie felt vindicated at the sound of something cracking beneath her fingers. The woman’s hand on Harrie’s hair fell away, and Harrie seized her chance, ignoring the way Voldemort cursed in some language beneath her breath.

Harrie slipped past Voldemort’s body, tucking and rolling out from between the woman’s parted legs and out of the kitchen. Landing hard on her side, she paid the sudden ache no mind as she snatched her phone from the kitchen table, not bothering with her wallet or house keys, and sprinted for the door.

She unlocked the door, sliding away the deadbolt quickly. Harrie needed to _move._ She didn’t know how much time she had before Voldemort recovered, and she could not afford to linger for longer than she had already.

_Just one more lock, you can do this._

Harrie stated firmly in mind, and after unlatching the last lock, she twisted the handle and pulled.

The door did not budge.

Harrie felt fear and panic cut her to the bone.

_No._

She yanked harder on the door, pressing her bare foot against the wall as leverage. But the door still refused to move.

Harrie wanted to scream in frustration.

Harrie froze when she felt the air shift behind her, and before she could twist away, Voldemort pushed her against the door—her hands flailing and hitting the door as her cheek slammed brutally against the surface, her chest and hips was pressed to the door.

Harrie faintly heard her phone clatter to the ground, but she paid the sound little mind. Her vision swam for a second, the wiry frame of her glasses digging uncomfortable into the side of her head as she tried to gather herself.

Then there was silence. Neither woman spoke.

"Do you like being chased, Harrie? For someone that strives to be brave, you certainly run _far_ too much,” Voldemort whispered into her ear, and Harrie clenched her eyes shut when the woman closed her teeth around her ear, her tongue smoothing along the sensitive flesh.

“Am I not who you wanted? I remember those nights of you working tirelessly to uncover my secrets. Your eyes crusted with your sleep deprivation, your skin pale with exhaustion. Have you forgotten?” Voldemort asked, but Harrie shook her head in denial, her words dying in her throat when Voldemort nibbled at her ear before smoothing down to the back of her neck, her mouth sucking on the flesh with her nails caressing the other side of her neck.

 _That was all before she had learned what she had_ , Harrie wanted to shout. All before she learned that the mummy had tried to snuff out her life.

“S-shut up!” Harrie shouted, both humiliated and unnerved that the woman had been watching her. Those were the eyes that had made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end, the very same fingers that had trailed lightly against her spine in the bathtub, the very same hand that had shoved her head beneath the water and tried to drown her.

The woman had been there the entire time—since the beginning and it was only just clicking for Harrie.

"Come now, you cannot deny that you _desired_ me. I have seen you, Harrie Potter. Watched you in the evenings as you laid out, sprawled on your bed as you slipped your fingers beneath your—“

“I said _shut up_!” Harrie shouted and tried to jerk her body away. Forcing her body backwards to throw the woman off her, but Voldemort was unmovable. It was like Harrie was trying to move a mountain, the woman’s body confining her to the door.

Harrie struggled, her arms reaching back awkwardly to claw and scratch at the woman’s sides, but then Voldemort whispered something that sounded an awful lot like “ _delicious,_ ” and Harrie’s hands were snapped upwards, her hands clasping together before being pinned out above her head.

Harrie felt more exposed than she already was. The fact that she was pinned so thoroughly against the door with an evil sorceress at her back, spreading horror through her limbs. Harrie could see the blurry image woman’s chest from the corner of her eye—but she dared not look higher, both afraid of what she might find and of the magnetism of Voldemort’s eyes. Instead, she fixed her gaze on the translucent fabric at the corner of Voldemort’s chest, ignoring the milky skin underneath as she tried to regulate her uneven breaths.

Harrie didn’t want to lose herself again when she had just regained her sanity. She needed to calm down and avoid looking her in the eye, to ignore the feeling of her mouth lapping at her neck and the fingers pressing against the nape of her neck.

The gentle touch both revolted and compelled her—the whisper of pleasure forcing a strained sound from her lips.

Harrie twitched when Voldemort dragged her nails down her neck, sliding right to the center of her spine before digging her fingers painfully between the shoulder blades, a surprised hiss leaving her lips when Voldemort slashed them harshly from the center of her back all the way to her tailbone in one smooth stroke.

It hurt more than Harrie had expected.

_I need to get—_

She groaned when Voldemort swiped her other hand down her back, clawing from the top of her left shoulder blade and stopping at her hip. Her hand clasped painfully around her hip, squeezing the skin hard enough to bruise. Harrie writhed against the door, the sharp sting of the scratches lining up her back like some crossword puzzle. It did little for her racing heart as the very same hand dug into her back, smoothed over her other hip and squeezed, the pressure forcing a pained sound from Harrie’s lip.

It hurt, nothing like the suffocating pain that had drowned out all reason, but still agonizing nonetheless.

She was bleeding, she knew. The trickling of moisture down her back from where the burn of Voldemort’s scratches were most intense, evidence enough of that. Harrie bucked her hips, pushing more closely into Voldemort despite her aversion, trying to escape the firm grip of Voldemort’s fingers on her hip, but there was nowhere for her to run.

She felt warmth begin to spread wherever she touched Voldemort—the feeling far more intense than the slight press of her fingers and the way her hand wrapped around her bare hip, and Harrie gasped.

Harrie was conflicted, her emotions flickering between distress and lust too fast for her to control.

“You can deny yourself all you like, but I have seen your heart and it is _mine,_ ” Voldemort purred into her ear before slipping her fingers away from her hip and caressing a burning path down to her arse. Harrie’s arms broke out into goosebumps, sweat gathering at the top of her brow when Voldemort whispered something she could not catch, and Harrie felt rather than saw Voldemort’s nails shorten until it was only Voldemort’s fingertips pressing against her skin.

Harrie was not sure if she should be comforted or alarmed by this. She opened her mouth to speak, to deny in fact that she belonged to anyone. She was her own _person_. She was not some possession that could be collected.

“I don’t belong to _anyone._ Least of all to you,” Harrie snapped, and Voldemort chuckled in response before trailing the fingers over her arse, the sensation making a cold sweat gather on her brow.

Harrie’s cheeks colored a bright red, and she pressed herself as closely to the door as she could, twisting her hips away with Voldemort following closely behind her movements.

There was nowhere for Harrie to move, but she tried anyways. She’d be damned before she made this easy.

“You’re pathetic. Stooping so low as using weird magic to get people to _want_ you. What? Afraid that your little bid for escape will never be successful because you look like some defor—“

Harrie cried out, her eyes closing shut when Voldemort smacked her arse brutally, the rings on her fingers bruising the sensitive skin from the ferocity.

“Hold your tongue, girl.” Voldemort’s tone was artic. “It is almost as if you _enjoy_ being punished.”

“Lift your magic, snake-face. Then we’ll see how much I’ll enjoy you touching—“

Harry yelped when Voldemort smacked her once more, the force of the blow somehow harsher than the last.

“Very well, _Harrie._ I accept your challenge.”

And then the heat detracted, Harrie’s senses finally her own. Her relief was instant, her instincts escaping from the haze that Harrie never realized had blinded her to the danger lurking in her flat. It certainly explained the compulsion to return.

Harrie almost smiled, but her elation was abruptly cut short.

Her relief was short-lived.

Harrie had no time to react, her mouth parting to form words that had danced along the back of her brain, stolen from her when Voldemort began to smack her arse in earnest, ripping startled cries and whimpers from Harrie’s lips, before kicking her legs more open and slipping limb between her parted thighs.  Harrie jerked, her eyes finally trailing upwards to catch a glimpse of Voldemort’s serpentine face from the corner of her eye when Voldemort’s other hand slipped over her arse, the fingers slipping past her arse cheeks as she continued to beat on her arse with her other hand. The fingers slid past her arsehole, grazing her finger against the quivering hole, drawing a sharp sound from Harrie’s throat, before sliding over her cunt.

“Sto— _ah!_ ” Harrie felt Voldemort’s fingers slip between her lips, trailing one long finger over the hot flesh. Harrie clenched her kegel muscles unconsciously, thrown by the sensation of fingers not her own teasing along the sensitive flesh before pressing lightly against her clitoris, her smacks ceasing.

Harrie’s reaction was instantaneous.

Harrie’s mouth parted, her hips jerking back from the contact. It was a shot of adrenaline—a burst of heat that traveled from the tips of her toes to the top of her head. Her spine arched, pressing closer to Voldemort’s taller frame as the woman teased along the nub with careful precision.

A slow back and forth motion that drove Harrie wild.

Harrie tried to speak, but Voldemort pressed more firmly against the nub—increasing the pace with which her fingers moved, as her other hand kneaded at her arse.

Harrie’s eyes rolled to the back of her head—whining and gasping for air..

“I thought you weren’t going to _enjoy_ it, Harrie,” Voldemort whispered, her tone smug as she mercilessly rubbed her clitoris, before switching the motions to rub the nub in circles rather than vertically, all while Voldemort pressed pressed her face to Harry’s neck, her hand squeezing before smacking Harrie’s arse once more.

Harrie yelped, unable to cease her squirming. Her fingers clenched into tight fists above her head—still trapped firmly in place—and she cut into her palms with her nails to fight off the zing of ecstasy that overcame her each time Voldemort pressed a little too hard on the nub, or each time Voldemort slapped her arse.

Harrie wanted the ground to swallow her up, embarrassment and shame coloring her cheeks red when Harrie’s hips gyrated into Voldemort’s hand each time Voldemort stroked her _just so._ The slick sound of Voldemort’s fingers swiping against her sensitive flesh too loud to her ears.

“Look at how _wet_ you are. Does the thought of being overpowered thrill you? Does the threat of danger make your stomach quiver and your cunt clench?” Voldemort laughed and Harrie cried out when the woman suddenly squeezed her clitoris between her fingers, the pressure too much.

Her eyes rolled to the back of her head when Voldemort squeezed until it was near painful. Voldemort licked a path down from her ear to her neck, her tongue tasting at the skin of her neck before latching her mouth where Harrie’s shoulder met her neck.

Harrie felt a pressure building in her cunt—one she was all too familiar with.

She was horrified, her mind screaming for her to resist. The voice of reason in the back of her mind urging her to bite her tongue until the pain severed her from the onslaught of Voldemort’s fingers expertly playing with her cunt, but it was difficult to listen. She felt as if she’d been flung overboard with no means to swim to short.

And then, viciously and savagely, Voldemort’s teeth sank into the muscle and her hand simultaneously slapped her arse brutally, the actions ripping a cry from Harrie’s lips. Harrie’s toes curled and her mouth slipped open as Voldemort tore into her neck like a demon possessed, her fingers squeezing, sliding, and teasing along her clitoris until Harrie was tipped over the edge.

She came hard, her vision blacking out when Voldemort continued to tease and touch along her clit—the only mercy the fact that Voldemort had pulled her mouth away from Harrie’s trembling shoulder.

“N-no more,” Harrie croaked before releasing a startled cry when Voldemort slipped one finger inside, hooking her finger upwards while rubbing relentlessly against her clitoris.

“O-oh _god_.” Harrie tried to shift her body away, to lean away from Voldemort’s body pressed so intimately against her, but there was nowhere for her to go. She was going crazy, the pressure of Voldemort’s teeth and the overwhelming pressure too much.

The pleasure had become painful—and Harrie knew that the woman was doing it on purpose.

“No more? But we have only just begun. It would be a shame if I did not meet your _expectations_ ,” Voldemort said with faux innocence, and Harrie could have cried when Voldemort pressed against her g-spot as she toyed with her clitoris.

It was too much too fast.

She felt another orgasm creeping along her spine, and she refused to give in. She clenched her jaw, and gnawed so viciously on her bottom lip that it came as no surprise when she tasted blood after only seconds of biting into the delicate skin.

Voldemort pressed her lips against Harrie’s ear, and blew warm air against it. Harrie quivered like a leaf, loathing both herself and the woman for what she was making her feel.

“No sassy response?” Voldemort teased, and Harrie snapped. She shoved aside her pleasure, focusing on the pain of her fingernails cutting into her palms and her tongue caught between her teeth, before speaking.

“I-is that all you’ve got, you bloody fossil? This is _nothing.”_

Harrie wanted to take the words back. To swallow the words back into her mouth and never let them out again. It was one thing to challenge Voldemort once, but to do it twice within the same evening was a death sentence. The woman had already proven that she’d go incredibly far to prove a point.

If a desperate woman was dangerous then a determined one was lethal.

Voldemort stopped all movement—her fingers twitching inside Harrie’s cunt before slipping out from the wetness trickling down her thighs. Voldemort smeared her fluids against her thighs as she moved them out, sliding back from her cunt past her arshole and away from her.

Harrie did not feel relieved by this in the least. She couldn’t help but suspect that this was the calm before the storm.

“Another challenge in one evening. My, quite the masochist you are.” Voldemort’s voice was pensive, considering. There was a strange breathy quality to her voice that had not been there before.

Harrie wondered if the woman was just as affected as she was by the whole thing. If Voldemort herself was tempted to take her own pleasure at Harrie’s expense.

Harrie sincerely hoped not. Her legs were shaking and her body was too hot.

 _I couldn’t possibly_ —

Harrie gasped when she was twisted around, her hands still above her head as her back was shoved abruptly against the wall.

Harrie cursed beneath her breath, her lungs tight as she tried to gather her senses, dizzy from being spun so quickly around.

When Harrie managed to gather herself, she finally forced her eyes to take in Voldemort’s serpentine face, her glasses still, miraculously on her face.

Harrie released a relieved breath when she didn’t feel the strange compulsion urging her to touch and to give in to Voldemort’s whims. Her mind was silent, and it was perhaps the only perk of challenging Voldemort.

Voldemort’s eyes were flames, swirling with hunger and determination. The combination was something out of nightmares, and Harrie, steeling herself, held her breath when Voldemort pressed her body against Harrie’s, her breasts uncomfortably close to Harrie’s face.

Harrie tried not to stare at them, fixing her gaze on Voldemort’s face instead.

And then Voldemort dropped to her knees, the motion so fluid and abrupt that Harrie exhaled in shock when Voldemort grabbed onto her leg and lifted it onto her shoulder. There was a whisper of magic, Voldemort’s lips moving strangely as she whispered the foreign word beneath her breath, before she pulled a thin piece of wood from beneath her dress and pointed it at Harrie’s breasts.

Voldemort looked pleased, and Harrie felt a wave of terror gather from the base of spine, horror flashing in her eyes, when thin ropes shot out from the tip of the rod—latching tightly around her nipples, looping around them two or three times in a fragment of a second. They felt itchy and tight—the sensation unlike anything Harrie had ever experienced before.

Voldemort then pocketed the stick, wrapping the rope around the bangles on her wrists before shooting Harrie a devious smile, and pressed a kiss against her inner thigh. Her tongue teased along the skin, and Harrie tried not to jerk in the woman’s hold when Voldemort’s hands pressed on her ankles, caressing and massaging her tense muscle as she moved further along her leg—her fingers creeping upward to wrap around her knee and lift her leg higher still, until Harrie’s leg was taut with discomfort.

She felt Voldemort’s breath wafting against her cunt, and Harrie wondered if this was truly happening. If she was really going to—

Harrie was tempted to look away, to kick the woman away from her sensitive skin. But her limbs were like jelly, her mind strangely silent as her muscles refused to cooperate with her unconscious demands. She knew she should be fighting, but she was frozen in place. The tumultuous emotions churning in her brain writhing and snapping, but Harrie simply did not know how to react. Voldemort’s gaze was burning into her own eyes and it was perturbing how intense the look was, how the desire and the viciousness in her eyes, contrasted with the otherwise placid expression on her face.

It was several seconds before Voldemort’s eyes slid away from her own, allowing Harrie a moment to breathe a breath she hadn’t realized she hadn’t taken in, before her eyes slowly trailed down her breasts, her nipples twinging as if caressed by the look, past her trembling belly, and finally, to her parted thighs.

Harrie felt like she was going to die of both shame and embarrassment all at once.

Harrie felt dread creep up her spine, unable to stop herself from shaking further when Voldemort’s tongue slipped from her mouth to lick at her bottom lip. Harrie followed the motion helplessly, drawn in by the thoughts that suddenly came bursting from her mind.

_She wouldn’t?_

“You’re soaking wet already, and I’ve barely touched you at all.”

Voldemort remarked and Harrie tensed, unable to stop herself from protesting when Voldemort leaned into her cunt and breathed hot air against her pussy.

_Oh god, she’s going to—_

“You deny me, protest that you do not _want_ this. But I can see it in your eyes, girl. I can taste it in the air,” Voldemort then tucked her face at the corner of her right thigh and sniffed along her thigh, and Harrie felt her cheeks flush a bright red. “Your desire is exquisite. Let us find out how long your resistance holds, little thief.”

Voldemort slipped her fingers over Harrie’s cunt, parting her lips open and exposing her pink flesh further to Voldemort’s burning gaze.

Harrie shut her eyes, unable to look any longer.

“Look at me when I take you,”Voldemort abruptly ordered, the tone leaving no room for protest. Harrie, startled by the sound, looked down, regretting it instantly when she met Voldemort’s lidded gaze and saw the woman part her lips further before latching her mouth onto Harrie’s cunt—her tongue flicking against her clitoris experimentally.

Harrie jerked, her back arching from the shock. A soft cry torn from her lips, her eyes fluttering shut when Voldemort licked at her, her tongue flicking against her clitoris mercilessly—the flat of her tongue pressing and teasing along her slit. Harrie tried to pull away, to fight the onslaught of pleasure that thrummed against her skin.

She’d never had someone go down on her before—only going as far as fingers slipping inside and stretching her open in the past. She was no innocent—having had some experience, but it was nothing compared to the skill with which Voldemort moved—the tip of her unusually long tongue flickering mercilessly against her ripping out cries from her mouth.

Harrie could easily lose her mind to this, could allow herself to drown in the moist heat of Voldemort’s mouth against her own. She couldn’t fight it—she moaned aloud whenever Voldemort’s tongue pressed insistently against her.

And then she felt her index finger prod at her entrance. The touch so light that Harrie hardly noticed it as drenched as she was with her juices and drunk on pleasure. Voldemort forced her finger inside, crooking upwards and pressing against something that made Harrie jerk and shut her eyes. She felt the ropes pull against her nipples as she did, the sharp pressure tearing a moan from her lips. It hurt, but, rather than detract from the heat of Voldemort’s mouth and the expertise of Voldemort’s finger, it enhanced the experience.

_Oh god, help her. She was losing her bloody mind._

And then Voldemort slipped a second finger inside, twisting and pressing against her as her tongue flicked against her clit without pause.

Harrie was drowning in the thick waves of her own arousal—her cheeks flushed red and her mouth permanently parted as she tried to gather her composure. Her senses consumed each time Voldemort flicked her tongue against her clitoris and pressed deliciously against her, or each instance Voldemort’s fingers fucked her, twisting the digits to stroke at her g-spot without fail.

So it came as a surprise when Voldemort pressed a finger past her cunt, and teased her pinkie finger against her arsehole—the sensation ripping a startled squeal from her lips.

“W-what are you doing?” Harrie gasped out, jerking and squirming in a useless bid for escape, and snapped her gaze to Voldemort’s amused ones.

Smiling wickedly, Voldemort smirked around her cunt and pushed her finger inside, the protest shaping around Harrie’s mouth dying in her throat when it burned, a hiss slipping past her lips. Harrie’s juices were dripping thickly from between her thighs, the burn amplifying rather than abating the pleasurable feeling of Voldemort’s mouth on her cunt and her fingers twisting inside her; fucking her mercilessly as Harrie tried and fail to rein in her thoughts.

 _Oh god, this feels_ —

Harrie felt the pressure becoming too much, her kegel muscles quivering and her toes curling with the onslaught of pleasure that wracked through her when Voldemort sucked and licked at her without pause, her fingers moving just as rapidly inside her. She was tipping too close to the edge—her orgasm almost guaranteed.

Harrie fought it with all her might—the haze of Voldemort’s skilled tongue and fingers insufficient to make her give in.

Suddenly Voldemort, as if sensing Harrie’s resistance, closed her teeth around her clitoris to nip at the nub—the pressure slight, but enough to rip a strangled cry from Harrie’s lips and push her over the edge. Harrie felt her mind go blank, white flashing from behind her open eyes. Voldemort’s teeth were gentle but they may as well have been eating her—they continued to nip at her clitoris and Harrie could do nothing but scream herself hoarse.

She gushed—her fluids splattering the woman’s robes and her face as another orgasm was wrenched out almost instantly after the last, her legs quivering and shaking with the intensity.

Harrie was breathing rapidly, her heart beating so fast that Harrie was afraid it might come out her throat.

And Voldemort did not stop touching her, her fingers teased and fucked her, curling and forcing themselves through her cunt as she licked at her. Harrie’s mind was drowning. She was so overwhelmed that she couldn’t speak a word—any and all attempts at speaking morphing into cries and babbling each time Voldemort nipped at her clitoris.

“ _P-please_.” Harrie begged, tearing her gaze away from Voldemort’s stare to look almost unseeingly at her ceiling when Voldemort ignored her pleas and continued to tease until the pressure in her navel began to build once more, another finger slipping into her arsehole tipping her over the edge once again, the motion of Voldemort’s fingers too much.

Harrie felt tears trickle down her cheeks from the overwhelming feeling—reluctantly turning her eyes away from the ceiling to watch how Voldemort fucked her, the woman’s eyes flickering to her own tear stained face before turning her attention to Harrie’s heaving chest. Harrie parted her mouth to protest, suspecting the woman’s intention, but instead of words, Harrie whined when Voldemort dug her face more firmly in between her parted thighs and yanked at the strings wrapped around her nipples, the burn working her better than pleasure ever could.

It ripped a choked, strangled sound from Harrie’s lips. The sensation of something flickering across her skin the only warning Harrie had before the strings tightened around her nipples—painful in their grip as Voldemort yanked and pulled on them. It wasn’t possible that the strings somehow had a life of their own; that they were constricting with each passing second as Voldemort practically devoured her cunt, but they did. And god, the pain of it was as sharp and consuming as the velvety feeling of Voldemort’s tongue against her.

The mixture of pain and pleasure overwhelmed her senses, and Harrie felt another orgasm rack through her, her eyes rolling to the back of her head, her mouth parting, and her tongue lolling from her mouth when she gushed, splattering Voldemort’s face with her juice from the intensity. Harrie was shaking so badly that it was a miracle she was even capable of standing at all—her body collapsing onto Voldemort’s strong shoulder, unable to rely on herself to stand.

And then Voldemort stopped sucking at her skin, her face separating from Harrie’s cunt to speak and her fingers inside of Harrie stilling. Harrie’s relief was almost instant.

“Your error, Harrie, was to steal from me,” Voldemort stated, and Harrie glowered weakly. Outraged and exhausted that the woman just refused to believe her—going so far as to sexually torture her to prove a point. A voice whispered that this was far better than the pain from earlier and Harrie silenced it immediately. She refused to acknowledge such a traitorous thought.

“I’m telling you I didn’t _take_ anything,” Harrie insisted, her voice weak.

Voldemort leaned in once more and Harrie panicked. She twisted and jerked, her eyes widening in fear when Voldemort’s lips were smoothed against her cunt and kissed those lips. It was slow and gentle—unlike the ferocity Voldemort had shown earlier.

Harrie’s stomach fluttered.

“Then,” Voldemort murmured into Harrie’s flesh, trailing a warm tongue over her parted legs, the appendage immediately seizing her cllitorous in the gentle motion.“If I were to summon my locket, it should not appear then?” Voldemort asked and Harrie nodded her head furiously—unsettled by the mirth in Voldemort’s eyes.

“ _Akkeo.”_ And Harrie felt unfamiliar metal shackle itself around her throat—Voldemort’s magic as thick as the smell of sex in the air.

Harrie felt all color drain on her face when Voldemort smirked up at her, the expression easily the most frightening thing Harrie had ever seen.

“I swear I didn’t take—“ Harrie was cut off by the locket suddenly tightening around her neck, the metal chain cutting off her air. Her words robbed from her throat.

Harrie tried to breathe around it, her vision growing dark at the edges as Voldemort slipped her fingers out from insider her—and rose to her true height.

The woman looked like a monster.

And then Voldemort smiled at her, her eyes glittering like rubies as Harrie tried to breathe. Her skin was white, the dark dress doing nothing to hide her naked flesh from Harrie’s own stare. She looked like a fallen angel—her beauty inhuman and demonic.

Voldemort whispered something Harrie could not hear through the rush of blood running through her ears—her focus consumed by the breathtaking appearance Voldemort presented and her lungs screaming loudly for air.

And then Voldemort’s dress vanished completely, a long wooden stick appearing between her fingers—dangling loosely between her index finger and her thumb. Harrie was awed by the display, but equally frightened.

The absence of air causing her vision to blur, for the edges of Voldemort’s white flesh to grow dark.

“It _seems_ ,” Voldemort murmured beneath her breath, her eyes flickering momentarily to the metal chain choking the life out of Harrie. “That you, indeed did not take it. My locket carries the stench of another presence in the desire you have imbued into the metal.”

Harrie didn’t know what this meant.

“Was it that friend of yours, girl? My my, how naughty she is to leave my locket here for you. How...shameless,” Voldemort purred, and Harrie gaped like a fish, only just realizing just who Voldemort was talking about.

_Hermione._

Harrie wanted to protest and deny it, but then, Harrie recalled her friend’s strange behavior at the museum after she’d looked into Voldemort’s sarcophagus, and then the conversation about the _locket_ —

No. Hermione could not have done this. Harrie refused to believe it.

“ _Yes_ , Harrie. Your little friend had nearly murdered you. Perhaps, unintentionally, perhaps not. But that hardly matters now, does it? My rebirth is imminent, and you—” Voldemort crooned, stepping so close to Harrie’s shaking body that there was hardly a centimeter of space between them; Voldemort’s breasts level with her own pallid face. “—will facilitate this, my little lion.”

Harrie felt her vision swim when the locket tightened further, cutting off what little air could pass through her obstructed windpipe.

“ _Eternity you have sought, and eternity you shall receive. Your life spared but another taken_ , _”_ Voldemort whispered before digging the wooden stick against her quivering throat, teasing along  the chain biting against her neck.

Harrie couldn’t look away from Voldemort’s red eyes, the rest of her face fading away as her body began to shut down. The burning gaze of Voldemort’s eyes and the way the woman’s lips twisted almost fondly, an image, Harrie knew, would be permanently ingrained in her mind.

She felt her toes go numb, her fingers slacken, and her legs begin to shake as her mouth parted to taken in much needed air, but was denied. Harrie could feel her horror like a dead weight at the center of her chest—similar to the pressure of the locket crushing her windpipe. It ate away at her like a parasite seizing control of its host.

Harrie was going to die. She could feel it in her bones, see it in the swirling red of Voldemort’s eyes as she watched her with a calculating look in her gaze. Her mind screamed, the voice in the back of her head crying out for her to move, to _fight_.

“ _For an eternity at my side_.”

And then, darkness, the shadows swallowing her screams.


End file.
